Tuesday 5 August 2008

Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1985

A real dancefloor classic today, with Ready For The World's eighties Billboard #1 smash Oh Sheila. Heavily influenced by Prince this band may have been, but really, what a top tune! A truly great song in its own right - which makes me wonder why the hell it stalled at a lowly 50 in the UK charts. Not even this performance at the 1986 Montreux Festival could help them crack the Gallup 40:

(with apologies for the Mike "Smitty" Smith intro)



That clip raises a few important questions for me, actually. Namely:

1) Who's the confused-looking woman with the bow tie standing next to Smith? Presumably she was some kind of co-presenter for the BBC, but I can't place her at all.

2) Whatever happened to the Montreux (pop) Festival anyway? It was a regular feature of the TV schedules every year for a while in the mid-to-late eighties, but then it just seemed to disappear without trace. Was this merely a BBC decision to axe it from UK screens, while it continued (or continues, even, for all I know) to be shown in the rest of Europe for years afterwards; or was the plug pulled on the entire festival at the same time we stopped getting it here in GB?

3) Does anyone actually care about any of this stuff apart from me? Thought not.

Ah well...

*adopts crappy 1980s Radio 1 DJ-style voice*

I hope you're all

*smarm*

...Ready For The World!

*cough*

Ready For The World - Oh Sheila mp3 (for 7 days)

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2 comments:

I Am Not The Beatles said...

I have never heard that track before, very pleasant.

Oh incidentally, Mike Smith told me to 'Fuck Off' once. I was 14 or something and watching him film an outside broadcast of The Late Late Breakfast Show LIVE! at Wookey Hole in Somerset, I asked for his autograph between takes and he shouted 'Fuck Off!' and pushed past me.

And that, just as Mike himself states on the youtube footage, is A FACT.

Kippers said...

What a fucker! You should have sold the story to the Wookey Hole Gazette or whatever. Imagine the headline that week: "Famous DJ In 'Swearing At Child' Shocker!"

What happened next, anyway? I hope that OB you were at wasn't the same episode where that poor bungee jumping member of the public plummeted to his death. Talk about adding injury to insult!