Writing songs with a mate down under,
Looked around for some riffs to plunder.
Said to him, “Do you think we’ll risk it?”
He just smiled and handed me a Girl Guide biscuit.

And I said, “Ohhh! ‘Kookaburra’ is huge down under,
And one man’s ‘quote’ is a judge’s ‘blunder’.
Can’t you hear the reporters thunder?
We better run, we better take cover.”

Flippancy aside, I can’t believe how annoyed the news has made me. The riff in question is a tiny quote within “Down Under”, so minor that the connection had never occurred to me before this story broke last year; and I’m guessing I’m one of the last generation of Aussie kids who would have grown up singing “Kookaburra”. Its key line is “Laugh, kookaburra, laugh, kookaburra, gay your life must be”, and I can’t see that getting much of an airing post-1970s—not out of rampant homophobia, but out of embarrassment over any double entendres in children’s songs, which people avoid by not teaching them in the first place.

So if the 1970s were more or less “Kookaburra”’s last laugh, even that tiny quote would be the only way anyone nowadays would hear anything from it. “Kookaburra”’s author died in 1988, so her only immortality is in the memories of middle-aged-and-above Aussies like me... and in those few notes in “Down Under”.

Even if it was a conscious rip-off (which it almost certainly wasn’t), who wants to see Hay and Strykert bankrupted for the sake of a copyright that has long since left a dead songwriter’s ownership? In the grand scheme of things, “Down Under” matters more to Australia than “Kookaburra”, the legal wranglings of lawyers looking for their “My Sweet Lord” moment notwithstanding.

Kookaburra’s writ in the Old Bai-ley,
Merry, merry king of the flute is he,
Laugh, IP lawyers, laugh, IP lawyers,
Pay for you must we.

(Okay, so they were Sydney lawyers. This scanned better.)

One scary thought is that the Wikipedia entry for “Down Under” was what tipped Larrikin off that they had a potential goldmine on their hands. In June 2009, before news of the case broke, it read:

The flute part in the song is based around the tune of “Kookaburra”, a well-known Australian children’s rhyme.

After a bit of hunting through the Wikipedia page’s edit history, this claim appears to have been added on 31 October 2006 by an anonymous contributor, and completely unsourced at that. I hope 210.10.199.224 is proud of themselves. Their only Wikipedia contribution, yet! (I wonder who it was. The IP number just resolves to an Australian ISP, so the trail goes cold.)

Apart from Hay and Strykert, the big losers here could be the Girl Guides. Not only have they lost ownership of their old song, but their historical connection to it could lose them public sympathy as a result of all this. And who knows—if they are still singing it around the campfire, they could find themselves being chased for royalties. They better run.

Wherever you are, I hope 2010 brings you far too many good things.

Wow, upgrading from MT3.16 with BerkeleyDB to 4.31 with MySQL wasn’t as painful as I feared. Assuming the templates all still work... §

Re the surprising smoothness of my Movable Type upgrade: I spoke too soon. It’s the annoying little glitches that suck up the hours. §

Saw District 9 at @cameocinema last night—a prawn cocktail of SF-action tastiness. Best in the genre since The Matrix, if not the 1980s. I love that it was set in a city where Hollywood would never ordinarily set SF. Would have been much duller in NYC etc. § §

Yo ho ho and a folder of mp3s... it’s Talk Like a #PirateDay! §

RT @plasticbagUK: A quickly assembled Flickr Gallery of the Sydney Dust Storm. [It’s Red Sails in the Sunset!] §

Gimme, gimme, gimme: even if you aren’t much of an ABBA fan, 15 quid for their entire back-catalogue is amazing. Puts the price of the Beatles box sets in perspective. § §

iSnack 2.0? Just call it Cheezymite, ya nongs. §

Relieved to hear that a relative is in Java on holiday, not Sumatra as we had first heard. The mounting death toll is awful either way... §

@bengoldacre: WW2 was more mobile, with more room for ducking & diving. WW1 was stuck in the trenches. Note the part of WW1 that does evoke derring do: fighter pilots who weren’t stuck in the trenches. § §

Reminding myself how great Kate Bush’s Aerial is. Disc 1 is very good; disc 2 is stunning. §

Somali pirates aren’t what you think. §

Loving Easy Peasy 1.5 on the Acer Aspire One. Forget all the hacking to make Linpus tolerable, just use this. §

RT @overlongtwitterusernamewhichisapaininthebacksidetofitintoonehundredandfortycharacterretweetsandbreakspagelayouts: Hello. §

So long, in fact, that it breaks my little joke. §

I don’t normally have NASA photos as desktops, but this is irresistible: dust trails on Mars (via @Glinner). §

#JanMoir complains about ‘a roaring ball of hate fire’. What a great potential name for a blog! §

Music biz announces an explosion in the UK singles market yet blames P2P for preventing the market from exploding §

Staggering how quickly CD singles have declined in the home of the double- and triple-single rip-off; down 90%+ in 5 years. [Nelson laugh.] §

Having trouble adding/removing software in Easy Peasy 1.5? The fix is in. §

‘Farewell to the casual music fan’—provocative post from @fingertipsmusic about the future of music. §

Workmen have hung a big grey Jackson Pollock-esque painting near my office. Now it’s overcast inside and out. §

If I friended a guy I’d befriended, but didn’t like having friend friends as friends and unfriended him, would we still be friends? §

Bureaucratic form-filling: Sword of Damocles, Procrustean Bed and Sisyphean Task, all in one. §

‘Unelected, twice-fired business secretary Lord Mandelson’ is a great lede. §

Mandelson thinks he can magic up billions with a copyright crackdown, and Labour are desperate for a rabbit. Paging @DerrenBrown... #webwar §

Film industry not dead: contribution to UK GDP 1995-2007—box office was much LESS before 2001. #webwar §

More ‘damage’: music, videos, pay TV, games worth £6.6bn in UK in 2000, £11.9bn in 2008. Music down, others up. #webwar §

Diana Ross, “Chain Reaction”, 8 March 1986

Three weeks at number one in Australia, from 21 April 1986. I remember dismissing this at the time as an attempt to dress up a past-it star in contemporary chart clothing (“Upside Down” was better), but it’s actually a bit stronger than that; the chorus is certainly memorable. Can’t say the same for the lyrics, and the production sounds thin, but it all makes for a tolerable enough concoction. I’m in the middle of a tolerable concoction... 5 from me.

Cliff Richard and the Young Ones, “Living Doll”, 29 March 1986

Mike: If we want this record to make number one, we’ve gotta rig the charts ... There hasn’t been a genuine number one since the Beatles split up.
Neil: Oh, wow—have the Beatles split up?

In my first Popular comments I noted that I wasn’t a big pop music buyer or listener before the age of fifteen, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening to music. Apart from the usual parental, peer and sibling influences, I was exposed to masses of it on television—in particular, the collected works of Bill Oddie, repeated on a six-monthly cycle throughout my childhood. The Goodies, along with Doctor Who, were the backbone of many young Aussies’ TV viewing in the ’70s and early ’80s, thanks to the ABC showing them back-to-back from 6.00 to 7.00 each evening. I know most of Oddie’s songs better than the number ones of the time.

The Goodies were also an effective gateway to their influences and peers: to the Goons, repeated endlessly on Radio National every Saturday lunchtime, and eventually, around the time I started buying pop records, to Monty Python, through the medium of the LP. (They were long gone from the box, and this was a good five years before the series were released on VHS.) And then there was Dad’s old Songs for Swingin’ Sellers LP, still the gold standard of comedy albums in my book, which even has some relevance here (as in here at Popular, and this here single), with one sketch taking off the British rockers of the late ’50s and another that no fan of Lonnie Donegan should miss.

Then in my mid-teens, just as I was discovering the joys of Another Monty Python Record, along came these guys, screened somewhat belatedly on the ABC but an instant hit with me and my friends. The Young Ones felt like they were ours: our Goodies, our Python and our Goons all rolled into one. I was mad for them, flawed production values and all, and consumed anything to do with the show that I could. In a mid-80s VCR-less household, this meant: watching the show when it was screened on actual television; buying the Bachelor Boys book as soon as it came out; buying “Hole in My Shoe” on 7”; listening obsessively to a tape of Neil’s Heavy Concept Album (another of my landmark comedy albums—among other things, its lounge cover of the Sex Pistols anticipated the brief career of the Mike Flowers Pops); buying a prized copy of Neil’s Book of the Dead at Foyle’s on my visit to London; and, a few months after getting home, buying this on glorious 12” vinyl.

Neil: So here we are in the middle of the twelve-inch. Just the same as a seven-inch, really, except you get five inches of nothing in the middle.
Mike: Oh, mind you, it does cost an extra quid.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a point. So listen, listeners, we got a quid off you for nothing.
Vyvyan: It’s still boring. I was looking forward to some raunchy guitar licks.
Rick: All right, matey, lick this raunchy guitar.
Vyvyan: All right, I will. [Zzzzztttt] Oh bum, I’ve electrocuted my tongue.
Rick: Brilliant! Stick him in a coffin before he realises he’s not dead.

It would be nearly twenty years before I saw the twelve episodes of The Young Ones again on DVD, and although they had of course dated, they still made me laugh. Intervening exposure to Bottom helped keep my inner-teenage-Mayall-and-Edmondson-fan alive, but it wouldn’t have if I still hadn’t found Mayall’s shameless mugging amusing. In Rick, Mayall created one of the great sitcom characters, one whose juvenile behaviour was precisely the point (“I hate old people!”) and whose try-hard anarchism was just the right degree of unsettling for any nascent lefty viewer.

Rick, of course, was most memorable for his particular musical obsession, one that you could only assume must be leaving the target squirming—so it was a source of great delight to see the target go along with the gag. Cliff immediately became a Good Sport in the eyes of the teenage Aussie Young Ones fans who helped send this to number one for six weeks. “Devil Woman” and “Wired for Sound” were all well and good, but taking the piss out of yourself was true class. And there can’t be many piss-taking moments on record as delicious as the transition from Rick’s hysterical build-up for “the total and utter king of rock ’n’ roll, CLIFF RICHARD!” to “Got myself a cryin’, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, livin’ doll”. The record was worth it just for that.

The song itself was pants, of course, and not worth returning to more than once every twenty years, but I’m still finding plenty to laugh at now that I do—possibly because I’m listening to the twelve-inch version, which has lots of extra Young Ones banter to leaven the dulcet tones of Cliff, like the bits I’m quoting here. The comedy side of it doesn’t match up to the shows themselves, but I’d still rate it an affectionate 6; the music would be a 3 or 4. Logic would dictate averaging that to a five, but I didn’t buy this for the music—did anyone?—so I’m going to stick with 6.

The record has another place in my affections: that twelve-inch single was the very last I bought that helped send a song to number one. I’ve acquired other number ones since, but they were either bought after the event or as part of albums rather than as chart singles—another reason this doll is locked in my trunk of special Popular memories. As for Cliff’s trunk, I don’t want to know what kinds of dolls he keeps there.

Rick: Oh, ha ha ha, Vyvyan, how very clever, I’m sure. Oh yes, let’s end this wonderful project on a silly little meaningless innuendo.
Vyvyan: All right.

a-ha, “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.”, 25 January 1986

This song represents an end of sorts to the first part of my Popular journey, because a-ha were the last great shared moment of my brother’s and my exploration of pop music. From about 1980 through to 1985 we had exchanged musical ideas and influences, but in 1984-85 I developed obsessions of my own, and once I went to university our musical paths diverged almost completely. A-ha was our last hurrah: my brother bought their first two albums, I taped them off him, and both of us reckoned that these guys had the goods.

“Take On Me” was their number one in Australia, but I’m glad we’re not talking about the obvious hit here. It seemed to become a millstone for the band, the “Creep” that they never overcame by releasing their own The Bends. And I mean that to be ambiguous, because they too released a second album that left their first in the shade. Scoundrel Days was a 1980s pop masterpiece, full of momentous synth-pop songs fused subtly with rock, and its impact was greater than it first seemed; but more on that in a moment.

Hunting High and Low, their first album, was in hindsight a less-satisfying draft, although it also had some great songs: the title track, “Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale”, and of course the first two singles. But its more straightforward synth-pop moments lost those songs’ distinctive charm, playing down Morten Harket’s epic vocals for something cosier and cuter, reinforcing the pretty-boy image he later found so constraining.

And what a pretty boy he was, and what a handsome man he still is; even the straightest, Aussiest teenage male could recognise that. Harket’s looks went beyond cause for jealousy or scorn to cause for wonder that here was such an amazing natural specimen. Would we have thought the same if he were American, or British? We certainly wouldn’t have if he were Australian. Here was one way that a-ha’s Norwegian heritage made them stand out.

Harket’s vocals were another, and they were rarely used to better effect than on this, my favourite track from their debut. “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” was a blueprint for Scoundrel Days, a much stronger showcase for their epic synth-rock fusion than “Take on Me”. I’ve been re-listening to both albums in their entirety, and besides their obvious “80s-ness”, what’s striking is how skilfully those dated sounds are worked into their overall texture, rarely outstaying their welcome. “The Sun Always Shines” is a good example; this is no simple pop song, but a complex, growing creature; not quite their “Paranoid Android”, but getting there.

The lyrics also show a Scandinavian complexity in their use of phrases that native English speakers would never have chosen—although certain other bands had shown that was no barrier to pop greatness. The verses of “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” capture the inward Nordic gaze beautifully, full of worry and gloom and fretfulness, and then contrast it with the joyous chorus and that title phrase. How much less striking this would be if they’d called it “Touch Me” or “Hold Me” (paging Samantha Fox and the Thompson Twins...).

Its most wistful aspect isn’t in the lyrics, though, but in the knowledge that it didn’t lead to world domination for a-ha. Yes, there were Bond themes and other lesser hits ahead, and there were break-ups and comebacks and now a final retirement looming; but a-ha should have been bigger. Much bigger. Their nine albums should be familiar to more than just a dedicated fanbase; and I say that as someone who owns only three. I kept meaning to explore further, but never quite overcame the illogical sense that if they were worthwhile I’d have heard more of them. Maybe this revisiting will give me the necessary nudge. It at least prompted me to check out their swansong, Foot of the Mountain, which I would recommend to anyone who loves the first two albums, and which in turn made me reflect on where a-ha fits in the bigger scheme of things.

In the early 2000s everyone was commenting on the Radiohead “clones”, the Coldplays and Muses and Keanes, and just as it was obvious that Radiohead was only one of Muse’s influences (a healthy dose of Queen being another), it was clear that many of Coldplay’s and Keane’s roots lay elsewhere. Chris Martin has since revealed himself to be a big a-ha fan, and if the Keane connection wasn’t obvious before, Foot of the Mountain certainly makes it so; the album it most closely resembles is Under the Iron Sea, which also happens to be the one that sold me on Keane. So a big part of the UK’s musical landscape of the 2000s owes a debt to a-ha; and not only the UK: in Norway, their influence can be heard in the work of Röyksopp and Erlend Øye (Kings of Convenience/Whitest Boy Alive). A-ha’s “retro” album feels like a reclamation of territory that was rightfully theirs, not that it will ever sell as much as Coldplay do on a bad day.

When Foot of the Mountain came out it was met with exasperating coverage from some of the UK press (though to be fair, not all), which continued through their retirement announcement (what’s your game, Grauniad?), and even though my own exposure to their music isn’t much more than those journalists’, I feel the need to proclaim how excellent they were, and to wonder if we missed sight of other equally grand vistas along the way, hidden by these early peaks. A-ha looked to most people like Mt Fuji, but maybe they were the Himalayas. Whether it was the synths, the good looks, or even their band name, we let ourselves be distracted by their surfaces and dismiss a band that was so much more than a one- or two-hit wonder.

I’d find it hard to pick between “Manhattan Skyline” and “Weight of the Wind” for best a-ha song ever, but this is right up there with them, and it’s a credit to U.K. pop buyers that you made it your number one. “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” is a song I could listen to endlessly, and very definitely a personal 10.

(I went back and forth about whether to give “West End Girls” a 10 when I knew that this would be getting one; the clincher was that “West End Girls” is a very occasional listen for me nowadays, with more nostalgic overtones, but I still listen to this fairly often after all these years.)

Billy Ocean, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going”, 8 February 1986

I always interpreted that title as “when the going gets tough, the tough piss off”, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t what was meant. It always gave this an unintended air of novelty song for me, rather than action-movie theme song. The “get started” reading is more American, although Ocean had lived in the UK most of his life, so you’d expect him to favour the other. I suppose he was just along for the Hollywood ride.

As average as it gets, with a point knocked off for silly mid-’80s features: 4.

Six weeks of this at the top of the Australian charts, starting on 10 March 1986. When the going gets tough, the tough listen to their brother’s a-ha albums.

Finally, some photographs fresh off the CCD rather than a year or more old. These are from Helensburgh, downriver from Glasgow on the Clyde, at around noon on Saturday. They aren’t tinted black-and-white shots: the sepia effect is from the camera’s cloud setting, with some minor tweaking of the contrast. Click for bigger versions.

Whether or not it was the worst year for number ones, 1985 claims one record: it was the first year that the UK charts had eight number ones that also reached the top of the Australian charts, beating 1984's previous peak of seven. (The Kent Report also shows there were seven in common in 1965 and 1967, but his 1960s charts were retrospective constructions based on state-by-state charts; there were no official national Australian charts in the '60s.) The 1985 singles in question were Foreigner, USA for Africa, Madonna, UB40 & Hynde, Bowie & Jagger, Jennifer Rush, Feargal Sharkey, and Whitney Houston. I bought precisely none of them, although I did buy one Australian chart-topper (Midnight Oil's Species Deceases EP).

There was a dramatic tailing off of number-ones-in-common the next year, although in top 5 or 10 terms the two charts still had plenty in common for the next few years. That peak of eight didn't occur again until 2004, but out of 31 number ones versus 19. In terms of overall proportions 1984's 7/14 is hard to beat, but it's safe to say that 1985 is one of the years when the UK and Australian number ones were most strongly aligned. There haven't been another 24 months like 1984-85 in the two and a half decades since.

Wham!, "I'm Your Man", 30 November 1985

Having been a huge Wham! fan at 15 I was hardly aware of this at 17-going-on-18, but not because I'd stopped paying attention to the charts (which I hadn't): when this went to number one in the UK, I was preoccupied with end-of-year exams and the impending trip of a lifetime. Between "I'm Your Man" reaching the top in the UK and being displaced, my family flew from Australia to Japan and then on to London for a Grand Tour of Britain and Europe in classic Antipodean style. In Australia, ten years' continuous employment entitles you to three months of paid "long service" leave on top of your regular annual leave; it's mostly only public servants and academics who can rack up that length of service, but that was my parents, so off we went, swapping our long hot summer for the Northern winter of 1985-86. We landed at Heathrow on the last day that this was number one, so I managed to miss it pretty much completely; in Australia it peaked at number three a couple of weeks later, while we were over here.

I had a look at my few 35mm photos of that first day in Britain. From the blue of the gloom I expect they were taken around 3.30, just as it was starting to get dark, but that whole day felt impossibly gloomy; Japan's winter days had been crisp and clear, and the view from Anchorage airport enroute had been of bright white snow, so the contrast wasn't just with summer back home. It felt like someone had emptied a giant hoover on Piccadilly Circus. No wonder blowing your nose turned a handkerchief black.

Compared with that Dickensian December welcome, this song sounds like the early summer we'd left behind. But that was the appeal of Wham!'s Fauxtown hits: either mirroring the sunshine outside the door or promising an escape to it. As late Wham! hits go this sounds a little too rote, but the chorus and groove are catchy, and at least the Motown stylings avoid the worst of 1985 production. If I'd been here when it was here or there when it was there I might like it more, but as I was there when it was here and here when it was there, I'll give it five.

Whitney Houston, "Saving All My Love For You", 14 December 1985

The arrival of Whitney Houston in these charts feels every bit as significant as Madonna's, with the roster of female pop legends of the '80s almost complete. That doesn't mean I am or was a particular fan--her later hits were too over-the-top for me--but revisiting this has been an eye-opener. I never really noticed that it was an adultery song, which tells me that I never really paid attention to the lyrics, or at least to that crucial first verse, and never saw the video. Easy enough to explain the latter: when this was hitting big in Britain, my family and I were driving around the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire, staying in B&B rooms without TVs in them (I can only remember a couple of B&Bs in all of that trip where we did get a TV in our room, and one of those was on a 50p meter), so to me this is a radio hit. Maybe it's fortunate that I didn't notice the adultery theme, for the sake of those long family car journeys and my teenage embarrassment levels.

Houston's pipes certainly sweep away the competition, but does her voice alone make this a good song? Those horrible '80s keyboards threaten to condemn it to the schlock category to which Christgau and others consigned her. But Houston's performance is pitched pretty much perfectly, and the song is really only undermined by that keyboard sound; if it weren't I could see my middle-aged self loving this unreservedly.

I keep wanting to back off from 7's or 8's when I have no desire to own the song, but for me this has a definite something that's missing in many of my 6's, and I was prepared to overlook the '80s production of "Careless Whisper", so I'll call it 7.

Number one in Australia for two weeks, by the way, in February 1986, just before Feargal Sharkey and just after Starship's "We Built This City".

Shakin' Stevens, "Merry Christmas Everyone", 28 December 1985

Sufjan missed a trick in not covering this ("Merry Christmas, Workers of The Rock River Valley Region!"). Apparently it was held back from release in 1984 so as not to compete with Band Aid. If only his record company had been more reckless, Popular could have been spared it...

A certain someone in my life has a great fondness for Christmas music, and over the years I've developed it too, half-goofy and half-genuine, depending which album or performance we're talking about. CDs I would once have passed by without a glance, by no-name performers on awful bargain-bin labels, are among our most treasured: '70s disco produced some gems, as did '90s Euro-disco, but the best are from the '50s and '60s, repackaged as lounge compilations in the '90s, with performers like Lou Rawls, Dean Martin and Julie London--here's a handy Shakey antidote. And if crooners don't float your sleigh, you can even find the familiar standards performed on kazoos and powertools. Most of these we picked up in Australia, the US, or via import from Amazon.com in the 1990s.

The UK Christmas album market is a very different affair: half Cambridge choirs, half compilations of dreary '70s and '80s Christmas pop, and half of that remixed into 70 minutes of musical sage-and-onion by Jive Bunny. We own next to none of those CDs, but you sure do hear enough of them every December, Wonderful Christmastiming you to tears every time you go shopping.

All of which makes it even more amazing that to the best of my memory I had never heard this before today. Or else I've forgotten it immediately every time I've heard it. That would make sense, actually, as only a few hours after watching the video I'm struggling to remember how it went.

In the same way that I heard Whitney on my family's UK travels that December, I must have heard this, but it honestly doesn't register. My memory of that Christmas is of a B&B in York where our "host" was almost resentful of our custom: "Australians! Typical," she sniffed, as if we had come all the way from the colonies just to annoy her. Merry Christmas everyone.

I never thought much of Shakey as a kid and don't give him much thought now, although I'll concede that his first two UK number ones had their charms (they were reasonable hits in Oz too). But it's flabbergasting that he notched up four: more than Adam Ant, Madness, and plenty of other worthier contemporaries. Maybe they should all have tried their hand at a bland Christmas song with cheesy Nordic video. Hey, imagine a 1981 Adam Ant Christmas single! Saaaaanta deliver / Your presents or your life...

I'd give that a lot more than 2, which is all I'd give this.

Later comments prompted some musings on the different Christmas music markets...

It's no surprise that the southern hemisphere countries don't make as big a deal of Christmas music; Christmas has a different feel there, and everyone's getting into a summer-music mood by then, stuff that plays well on the car stereo while you're out and about--not sleigh bells and choirs. In Britain, people stay indoors in December, because it's dark by four o'clock, so indoor pursuits like listening to music and watching Christmas telly are much bigger. Christmas day in Oz means taking your new bike out for a spin in the sunshine; here it means staying in and watching every Bond film ever made.

But that's only part of it. Plenty of the US has a wintry Christmas too (although not as dark as here; more snow, more daylight hours), so they're right into Christmas music as well; but they produced tons of really good stuff in the '50s, which has filled that traditional role ever since. New Christmas songs in America are like saplings in an old forest, struggling to find the sun in the shadow of giants.

Britain didn't seem to produce as many big Christmas singles in the 1950s and '60s, so they had to wait for Slade et al to pick up the pop baton. There was a rush of songs for a decade, and then it tailed off for similar reasons: a set of standards had become established, and new songs had a hard time competing. The Darkness managed it by evoking those '70s hits, which was a canny move, because the Christmas pop sound in Britain is the sound of the '70s, from Slade through to this tail-end throwback of Shakey's. (Notable exception: Cliff in the 1990s, who was himself by then a throwback.)

This is my theory, which is mine, etc.

I almost forgot the one other thing I was going to note about this song, which is its significance in terms of my autobiographical tale of travelling around the UK at the time. Shakey hit number one the very day that my family and I were wandering up and down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh--the only time I visited the city before upping sticks and moving here in 2001 (although I also visited the west of Scotland in 1992). We had plans to go further north, but the weather turned miserable after that; after spending a night in a small town near Stirling, we bypassed Glasgow and skated down the motorway to the Lake District, inching along the black ice past lorries that had slid off the road.

And to end this particular slice of memoir, the first number one of 1986...

Pet Shop Boys, "West End Girls", 11 January 1986

More than any other song, this captures the London I met in the winter of 1985-86, a city that captivated me then and still feels like an old friend when I visit it today. Australians have had a close relationship with it, at least if they're my age. Not only are Cockney accents closest to ours, but we grew up knowing almost as much about London as any of our own cities, thanks to the ubiquitious presence of BBC and Thames productions on 1970s Australian television. Its street-names had a Monopoly-board resonance, and its landmarks were as familiar as the Sydney Opera House. The same couldn't be said of Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool.

There I was in London, exploring its wonders--not just record stores, but a Megastore! and affiliated with my favourite label, at that--and this song was everywhere, filtering softly but insistently through speakers in shops and taxis. I could scarcely imagine a better soundtrack. The Pet Shop Boys had taken the sounds of the moment and made them timeless; it's remarkable how little this has dated, given the potential of some of its elements to do so. They captured the dark of those long London nights, but gave it the warmth of the long black overcoat that you shed at the door of the nightclub. "West End Girls" is an invitation indoors, an invitation to sample the mysteries of this endlessly surprising place, where every space has been overwritten a hundred times by history and is still being inscribed by new generations of West End girls and East End boys, casting off class and the past to come together for just this night to make something mesmerizing. 9.

Number five in Australia, by the way, entering the charts at the end of March. I was back home by then, so this must have been a bittersweet reminder of where I wasn't: on holiday in Europe, rather than slogging through first-year Calculus at uni.

Madonna, “Into the Groove”, 3 August 1985

Madonna’s albums were another of my brother’s departments, but I liked some of the tracks on the first two, especially “Burning Up”. It was to be a while before I really appreciated her in my own right. Re-listening to this, I can remember what triggered the switch: it was when she lost the squeaky cuteness in her voice, which I always found off-putting. Squeaky cuteness didn’t bother me in other performers’ songs, though, so perhaps it was the overtones of predatory squeaky cuteness that were, um, unsettling. As in the cover of Like a Virgin. Not for nothing did we and our friends call her “Madoona”. (A doona in Australian English is a duvet [UK] or comforter [US]. We were teenage boys, after all.)

Plenty of other things about Madonna marked her out as a performer worth attention, of course, including her playful shifts in persona in 1984-85. But “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” (the first being her first Australian number one, for five weeks from 10 December 1984) both appealed to me more than “Into the Groove”, and personally still feel like the biggest early-Madonna landmarks.

Madonna owned the Australian charts for eight weeks in mid-1985, first for the double A-side of this and “Angel”, then for “Crazy for You”. This is certainly the highlight of that trio, but it just wasn’t for me, and these days I can only hear it as ’80s nostalgia rather than as a rediscovery... plus the production sounds a bit too ’80s-thin from this distance. 6.

UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, “I Got You Babe”, 31 August 1985

“Guest vocals by Chrissie Hynde”...

“I got you, babe, a clean towel and washcloth, and there’s extra blankets in the wardrobe if you need them. Oh, and breakfast is from 7 till 9.” —UB&B40.

I wonder if there’s a parallel-universe Popular where those who bought this and “We Are the World” are bemoaning the ones who bought “You Spin Me Round” and “Into the Groove”. This spent three weeks at number one in Australia, and even back then, the idea of it being recorded by two people who had no particular reason to perform together seemed utterly pointless. Still, a cover version can reveal new aspects of the source material, and can add memorable flourishes of its own... nope. Still pointless. The backing is wafer-thin, and one more serving may very well cause me to explode. 2.

David Bowie and Mick Jagger, “Dancing in the Street”, 7 September 1985

Bowie seems to have invented ridiculous big-trouser dances five years before M.C. Hammer. The hands in pockets at the top of the stairs wasn’t a good look.

As over-the-top as this was, it did at least have the saving grace of alerting those of us too young to remember it to the original. (“I Got You Babe” had never really gone away, at least where the AM radio hits ’n’ memories format was concerned.) But as the final number one for two once-great performers, this was a tawdry swansong. I’m relieved to learn that they considered it a one-off for Live Aid—if it had been, it might today have a kind of kitsch charm—but why did they agree to extend its life? Charity is all well and good, but when you’re a millionaire it’s got to be better to write a fat cheque than to don a silly costume and go out shaking a bucket. If you saw someone boogyin’ up to you in those outfits, you’d be dancing around them in the street. 3.

Midge Ure, “If I Was”, 5 October 1985

Reading Midge Ure’s Wikipedia entry was a revelation. Not only did he play a part in “Vienna” and “Fade to Grey”, he was briefly in Thin Lizzy (in between Gary Moore and Snowy White) and turned down the lead singer spot in the Sex Pistols (imagine how different history would have been if he’d taken it... all those London punks dressed up for tourists would have been up here, for a start). A pretty fascinating musical history for someone who wasn’t one of the Big Names.

I was genuinely surprised by the dislike for this track at Popular, when there were so many more offensive 1985 number ones than this. Okay, he messed up the subjunctive, which should really only be of concern to word-tragics like myself, but otherwise it’s a pleasant listen, even though I couldn’t recall it at all until re-watching the video. I suspect it’s precisely because it evokes fond memories of “Vienna” and “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes”, and doesn’t sound very 1985 to my ears as a result. A number 10 in Australia, and a 6 from me.

Jennifer Rush, “The Power of Love”, 12 October 1985

This spent two weeks at number one in Australia, and did nothing for my 17-year-old ears; I imagine I saw it as another sign of a duff chart year, at least in terms of number ones. But my reaction today is surprisingly positive. There’s an earnestness about Rush’s performance that disarms my default dislike of power ballads; the jerky upper-body dance moves on the video only add to that. The European underpinnings may have turned off the American market, but endear it to me: I hadn’t realised that this could be considered part of a mid-’80s mini-invasion of German-related acts, but musically it makes sense.

The lyrics capture that falling-in-love feeling of blissful security tinged with apprehension, and the apprehensive aspect makes for an unusual and effective hook. Tom mentioned the curious disconnect between lines, making them sound contradictory at first. Maybe that’s part of what sold the song: it keeps us focussed on the words, trying to make sense of them—and when you succeed you feel rewarded, like after completing a crossword. I enjoyed that puzzle... I enjoyed that song.

It’s never going to end up on my iPod, but I can see the appeal. 5.

Feargal Sharkey, “A Good Heart”, 16 November 1985

In Australia, people my age were too young and too opposite-end-of-the-earth to remember “Teenage Kicks” (John Peel’s broadcasts didn’t carry that far), and when this was your first exposure to Feargal his high vocals had a certain novelty value. We duly gave “A Good Heart” two weeks at the top in February 1986.

Now, though, it feels like one of the most dated tracks of the time. The energetic concert video is an utter mismatch for its soundtrack; the puttering keyboards and incongruous soul-singer backing sap all the life out of it, and that strangled squawk of guitar doesn’t inject any back in. I had expected to give it 4 or 5, but 3 is looking pretty reasonable.

Some are now claiming that there’s nothing offensive in the Hey Hey performance because no offense was intended, and that anything said to the contrary is political correctness gone mad. But for crying out loud, putting a bunch of guys in shoe polish on a high-profile show on national television is not on a par with telling a racist joke to your mates and telling the one who says “steady on” to lighten up. The latter is bad enough, but it’s a personal failing; this was an institutional one.

Does that make it a national failing? Australia does have an entrenched strain of racism, which has been at the heart of some bitter political battles right up to the present day. But like America, Britain, France and anywhere else, it’s divided on such matters, and the battle for control of the cultural debate ain’t over by a long shot. John Howard ushered in a disturbing shift in the national mood during his eleven years as prime minister, but his brand of ’50s nostalgia never convinced everyone. The golden age of Australian conservatism was just as contested at the time: Menzies only narrowly won the 1954 and 1961 elections, and for the sake of a few seats each time our account of that era would have been quite different.

To put it into perspective, this isn’t as disturbing as the Tampa affair, which was a national shame that nevertheless got Howard re-elected (and a national shame because it did), but it’s still plenty embarassing. The worst of it? That it was sparked by a show that was an embarassment twenty years ago, whether or not it featured guys in blackface. If the BBC can tie itself in knots over two radio announcers leaving lewd jokes on a fellow comedian’s answering machine, Channel Nine should be shutting its doors and taking down its broadcast antenna.

It won’t, of course, but it’ll be extremely interesting to see if Hey Hey gets a full series after this.