Wednesday 4 March 2009

Try penny whistling this

I'm almost tempted to call today's band a one-hit wonder, but that wouldn't be quite true, as their closest brush with the charts (in the UK at least) came when their version of Can't Help Falling In Love agonisingly stalled at number #42, in 1986. So they didn't technically manage a hit at all. How about a half-hit wonder? That'll do.

The song did at least hang around the lower reaches of the top 75 for eight weeks, which is longer than many actual pop 40 hits manage; it also turned up as the theme song to (at least) two films: John Hughes's 1987 teen drama Some Kind Of Wonderful and the Stephen Frears-directed 1993 TV movie The Snapper.

The latter's easily the best of these films, by the way, and is also miles better than the other two largely-disappointing movie adaptations of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy of novels, The Commitments and The Van. The books themselves are all terrific, though, if you've somehow never got around to reading them.

Anyway, not for the first time, I digress. Here's the Stephen Hague remix of Can't Help Falling In Love as featured on the Some Kind Of Wonderful soundtrack. I love this song to bits.

Lick The Tins - Can't Help Falling In Love mp3 (for 7 days)

Mildly Interesting Pop Fact: Lick The Tins' name derives from a nickname given to an old tramp by the children from guitarist Ronan Heenan's home town. At least that's what it says on their Wikipedia page - and Wikipedia would never lie to us, right?

Buy the Lick The Tins album Blind Man On A Flying Horse

2 comments:

Max said...

I've got Some Kind Of Wonderful on DVD and have loved it for years. There's a great bit in it where one of the main character's (Keith played by Eric Stolz) younger sister has broken into his bedroom to listen to his records and she's playing The Hardest Walk by The Jesus and Mary Chain! Oh and of course the main music, Brilliant Mind by Furniture (which I have as one of my slightly more obscure ringtones...)
Good post Kippers!

Kippers said...

Aye, that was one of the best things about the John Hughes movies of the mid-80s - they'd invariably be soundtracked by a multitude of extremely decent British bands! It's funny to think now how all-conquering UK bands in general were back then; the Billboard charts often seemed to have more British acts in them than Americans!