Utter, utter, utter Popular.

The last few Popular hits of 1985 were up and down, but for me they evoke a particularly memorable time. What most brings back the year for me in chart terms, though, is scarcely to be found on the UK number ones chart. The Eurythmics were one touchstone, although I’ve already mentioned that Australia had the other hit from that album. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was another; I bought the 7”, and remember feeling slightly out of step in doing so, because it didn’t make the top five in Australia. Tears for Fears are a big gap, and there’s another band we’ll get to soon enough. I also bought and adored Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking”, which no doubt is too late in their discography to be cool, but sod that. (Hey, my favourite album of theirs is Real Life, so what do I know.) And although they never bothered the top ten, Killing Joke’s “Love Like Blood” and Night Time were huge for me that year, thanks to a mate at matric who put me onto them. He also introduced me to the charms of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia, so I owe him double; thanks, Sim.

Beatlesque Beginnings

Two Popular asides.

Not Dead Yet

The site Information is Beautiful did the rounds yesterday (MeFi), and this post of an infographic from the New York Times about music formats piqued my interest. Music sales across the board seem to be falling off a cliff, with the implication that nobody will be buying any music at all in a few years. No doubt the RIAA would blame it all on file-sharing, but there are surely other equally or even more significant factors, some of which the graphic itself suggests.

So Last Year

For someone who used to post about new-ish releases fairly often, I seem to have become trapped in an early-’80s musical timewarp here. It’s not all the fault of Popular, although that has had a big retro-influence on my listening for the past couple of years. A lot of the problem is that the parental lifestyle no longer allows much space for listening to whole albums. I rarely get a chance to listen to stuff on the stereo, because a certain two-year-old objects to anything that isn’t Madness’s “Driving In My Car” or Feist’s The Reminder (“the lady”, as we know her; thank God it’s a good album, or by now the lady would have driven us nuts). On the trip to and from work I listen mostly to podcasts (Adam and Joe on 6 Music, Radio 4’s Friday night comedy, and a few others), and even that has stopped while I’ve been cycling to work in the good weather. Apart from that, my listening has mostly consisted of single tracks gathered here and there, almost all of them through iPod headphones.