Yellow Pearl - Phil Lynott

Play this loud and fiddle with the treble on your graphic equaliser. You can pretend you're in a spaceship.

Thin Lizzy mainmain and Dublin-born rock genius Phil Lynott downs 3 pints of Beamish round at Midge Ure's house. Two of the lads from Visage drop by with Logan's Run on Betamax and Phil accidentally invents Electroclash (whatever the hell that is).

Fact: Yellow Pearl was co-written with Midge Ure, who co-wrote the Band Aid single which contains the phrase 'The Clanging Chimes of Doom';

Fact: 'The Clanging Chimes of Doom' is the worst lyric in the history of popular music.

Fact: Yellow Pearl was the theme tune to Top of the Pops in the mid-Eighties.

Facts: Yellow Pearl's 'Attack Attack Attack' chorus was inspired by a typically aggressive Millwall Football Club chant and Phil Lynott is the only Irishman without a red face and a replica Manchester United jersey...

But that's only because he's dead.

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Is That All There Is? - Peggy Lee

I make no apologies for including this fruity little number. It's the last word in pop introspection and if more people had realised that we might have been spared 20 years of lyrical miserablism by white boys with guitars.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were two of the most important songwriters in modern popular music and 'Is That All There Is' is their masterpiece; an inspired ode to ennui which finds the perfect cypher in the smoky vocals of Peggy Lee.

Leiber and Stoller may have written Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and Chapel of Love but they never wrote anything as deliciously overwrought as 'The Clanging Chimes of Doom'...

My parents have terracotta butterfly chimes in the 10ft by 12ft wooden shed that they optimistically call a 'Gazebo'. They never even come close to 'clanging'. They just 'chime'.

Feel free to include the phrase 'The Clanging Chimes of Doom' in everyday conversation. Maybe at a dinner party, in a business meeting or when describing symptoms to a doctor.

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Manifesto & Book News

If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols, candy-based metaphors for carnal acts or lyrics about hugging, squeezing and rocking all night long, it's in.

Yeah, your sister is a White Witch...



> Martin Lampen (latest book news, contact details and other stuff)

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