It may not feel much like a Pleasant Valley Sunday on the weekend we said goodbye to this gentlemen, but he certainly left us with some amazing musical memories.
RIP, Peter Tork, you and your pals made us all daydream believers...
As I type this on Saturday evening, we've had no takers for this week's number 10... which might be my first win in quite some time. Otherwise, Lynchie took the crown, with admirable support from Charity Chic, Walter, Chris, Rigid Digit and a last minute save by C.
10. King Midas's stooge sounds like the bloke up above.
King Midas turned everything he touched to solid gold.
Mo was one of the Three Stooges.
The gentleman at the top of yesterday's post was David Soul
No Top Ten today - I'm saving this week's till Sunday. You'll find out why then.
In the meantime, another one of these...
3. M/A/R/R/S - Pump Up The Volume
Can you pinpoint the moment when you fell out of love with the Top 40? If you want to say, "This week, with Ed Sheeran taking up 9 places on the Top 10", then good on you... you've stuck it out far longer than most. There is a point in everyone's life when the singles chart switches from being a treasure chest full of dazzling pearls to a bucket of clams you have to sift through to find an occasional oyster. When that happens varies - it might be in your late teens, it might be in your 20s. Chances are if you're still in love with the Top 40 in your 30s, your taste just ain't that discerning. But it comes to us all in the end.
For me, it was 1987. And I was only 15 years old. Ironic, really, considering that was the year I actually started buying singles...
Here's how you can tell the moment the charts stopped being perfect for you. A quick google search and you'll find a Top 100 best selling songs for any year of your choice. If I pick a random year from the late 70s up to the mid 80s, I could sing you virtually every song from that hundred. Even the ones I don't really dig, like Jennifer Rush - The Power Of Love; or Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson - I Know Him So Well... the two best selling songs of 1985. They were both very annoying at the time, but now they fill me with nostalgia. (There was a brilliant version of I Know Him So Well on last week's episode of Inside Number 9 which made the memories come flooding back.)
But as soon as I hit 1987... the clams start gathering.
Stock Aitken & Waterman. Steve 'Silk' Hurley. Sinitta & Spagna.
Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish. Five Star. Taffy. House Master Boyz & The Rude Boy Of House.
Worse was yet to come, in '88, '89, '90... the years when music should have meant the most to me, and the charts kept kicking me in the balls. And I can trace it all back to one track, a novelty Number One by a group who never released another record (not under this name, anyway).
Thirty years later, I can listen to Pump Up The Volume without hating it. Certainly not in the way I still loathe Technotronic, S-Express, Bomb The Base, Krush, D Mob... and all the others that would slither through the doors M/A/R/R/S kicked open. They said nothing to me about my life.
But M/A/R/R/S... I can recognise its influential place in the history of pop... it's an audacious mish-mash of samples over an infectious beat with some cutting edge / extremely dated sfx sprinkled over the top. When I hear it, it can't help but take me back to 1987. Childhood's end...
That's not to say you can't fall back in love with the singles chart later in life, by the way... I did again in the mid-90s. But it didn't last, and ultimately I had my heart trampled all over once more. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson...
