Posts Tagged ‘Cliff Richard’

Bottom Feeders: The Ass End of the ’80s, Part 74

feeders52

See, here’s what I like about writing this column. Some weeks I give you a song you haven’t heard or a factoid about a band that you didn’t know. Other weeks you guys give me information I don’t know and turn me on to music that’s missing from my life. Of course that happened last week with the Replacements chatter in the comments.

So far I’ve been able to get to two of their albums. I know you guys recommended I start with Tim (1985), but I haven’t been able to hit that one yet. I have, however, listened to Let It Be (’84) and Pleased to Meet Me (’87), with pleasing results.

I went with Let It Be first and thought it was decent, but it doesn’t flow very well at all. I dug “Favorite Thing” and the cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond” the most.

Then I moved to Pleased to Meet Me, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The first three tracks — “I.O.U.,” “Alex Chilton,” and “I Don’t Know” — are killer, with the latter being my favorite of the three. Pleased certainly feels more like an album than Let It Be, and based on just those two records I can pretty much tell I’m going to like the major-label-era Replacements the most.

Either way, both records were very much worth my time, and I will listen to Tim soon, so thanks to everyone for the recommendations and for turning me on to a band I never would’ve listened to otherwise. That’s part of what this series is all about.

Here’s our third week of artists whose names begin with the letter R, as we continue to look at songs that charted no higher than #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the 1980s.

(more…)

White Label Wednesday: Cliff Richard, “We Don’t Talk Anymore”

wlw.jpg

Everyone seemed to have so much fun jumping into the wayback machine with Nicolette Larson – and really, who wouldn’t want to jump into a wayback machine with Nicolette Larson? – that I thought I’d write up another song from the same era, though from a completely different universe than the one that birthed “Lotta Love.” I bring you, Sir Cliff Richard.

Cliff Richard was the Kylie Minogue of his time – and a lot of other people’s times – in that he racked up hit after hit after hit in his native UK (born in India to British parents, technically), while scratching and clawing his way into the American Top 40 a mere nine times. Nine times, compared to…wait for it…one hundred and twenty-five Top 40 hits on the UK charts (number spelled out for dramatic effect), including a staggering 70 Top 10 hits. Wow. Just…wow. That’s insane. And it will never happen again.

By the time “We Don’t Talk Anymore” reared its mellow disco head in late 1979, Richard had already cracked the UK Top 40 sixty-seven times. To establish a point of reference, the Beatles have notched 52 Top 40 hits in the States to date. No wonder he was knighted in 1995. The man is a national treasure, and not even a 1985 remake of his 1959 hit “Living Doll,” performed with the cast of BBC cult show “The Young Ones” (resident douchebag Rick, “spelled with a silent ‘P’,” was a big fan of the Cliff), would change that. If he were an X-Man, he’d be Juggernaut. Unstoppable, that Harry Rodger Webb.

(more…)

Jesus of Cool: In Praise of … Cliff Richard?

Last week in this space, I described a single by the Canadian rock band Prism as “sounding like an early-’80s Cliff Richard single (not that there’s anything wrong with that).” I’d like to say I spent hours deciding whether or not to make such a seemingly insulting comparison, but I’d be lying – I tossed it off. It wasn’t until I was editing the piece that I began weighing the significance of what I’d written; suddenly (ahem), the wheels were in motion, and that phrase triggered a flood of memories and bits of knowledge that I’m pretty sure I’ve been suppressing since about 1983 – when I finished high school and headed off for college determined to invent a cooler version of my previous self (just like everyone else does, right? Right?).

Cliff RichardAnyway, thanks to the magic researching powers of the Internet, I quickly discovered that not only had I been a fan of Cliff’s turn-of-the-’80s singles like “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” “Dreaming,” and especially “A Little In Love” – I had actually owned a Cliff Richard album. Legit MP3 files are difficult to come by for some of these tunes (how can it be impossible to buy a copy of a top-10 hit like “We Don’t Talk Anymore”?), but as I searched iTunes and Amazon I found the title of his 1980 collection I’m No Hero vaguely familiar, and as I sampled track after track I recognized each one, until…

Cripes! I know it was 28 years ago, but I’ve owned at least 10,000 records/tapes/CDs/digital albums in my life, and until now, I thought I had a pretty good handle on which ones I’ve had and which ones I haven’t. Is Cliff really that forgettable?

Apparently so, at least in the U.S.

Of course, in the U.K. no homegrown solo artist has ever been bigger. Beginning with “Move It” in 1958 – a song that no less an authority than John Lennon identified as the “first British rock record” – Cliff has sold more singles than any other act in British history. (more…)