Summer Song (Wishing You Were Here) - Slade

It's Summer and Black Country pop rockers Slade Wish You Were Here. Nice of them.

It's Summer and on 'Wish You Were Here' Judith Chalmers is cruising the Med. Chris Kelly has a cottage in North Devon. John Carter is brass rubbing in the medieval town of York. Frank and Nesta Bough are playing high stakes Mahjong for big Renminbi and Chongqing Province heroin rights with Triads in a Shanghai crack house. Cliff Michelmore is at the Pudong Ramada nursing a stab wound and making full use of the hairdryer and complimentary coffee and tea making facilities.

Wish You Were Here comes from the soundtrack to the brilliant Slade move, 'Slade in Flame'. Not only is it the only rock movie that really Rocks and it successfully marries A Hard Day's Night's screwball humour with the kitchen sink grittiness of British new wave cinema, but it's the only movie I can recommend that features a cameo by Tommy Vance and was filmed entirely on location in Wolverhampton.

Back at Madame Wong's, Frank gets Mahjong with 1-2-3 Dragon tiles chow. All bloody hell breaks loose.

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Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) - Scritti Politti

In the Eighties the popular belief was that naming your band after a Marxist treatise or Chilean philosopher somehow absolved you of the deadly sins of being a synth-loving art student, wearing a frilly white shirt with a black Bolero hat and flogging your funk pop wares on tv's Saturday Superstore circuit.

So it was that Green Gartside, high on a Thatcher-era combination of sushi, cocaine, vague politics and Findus cripsy pancakes, sang like a girl and named his band after an Italian political diatribe.

Green Gartside dissapeared in the late Eighties, only re-ermerging a few years ago on collaborations with Shabba Ranks and Mos Def; presumably picked because they were the only people in pop who were in no position to laugh at his oversized blouses and stupid hats.

Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) uses a sub-title in parenthesis to elaborate on a song title that's not apparent from the lyrics. It seems like a clumsy record company compromise, but essential in order to avoid to avoid repeating the Orinoco Flow debacle of 1988.

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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.

But he looks like a Womble



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