I didn't really know what to call this week's Top Ten, and I only really settled on "Mythical Creatures" under protest... since clearly everyone knows Bigfoot isn't a myth.
Apologies, all you sceptics, but I'm 100% Fox Mulder: I want to believe. The alternative is a much more boring world.
Anyway, here are ten songs about creatures I'm willing to be convinced are just as real as you or I...
Welcome, all your Freemen and women, to another edition of Snapshots. I'm glad you've chosen, of your own free will, to spend a little time on your Saturday morning staring closely at a bunch of weird photos and trying to decipher a bunch of sub-par crossword clues.
Who are they and what connects their songs?
10. Half a dozen English immigrants.
9. Bony Beth.
8. Blackburn / Ely Riot.
7. 15/3.
6. Influential director and blinking bloke.
5. Third Netflix Queen just might...
4. Conservative Councillor.
3. They'll give you the hump.
2. Logic, Radiator, Guerilla.
1. Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum.
You probably didn't need Watson's help to Sherlock this week's answers... but all will be revealed tomorrow morning, just in case.
Heavy Jelly is the name of the new album by self-described "Two man boy band from the garden of England" Soft Play.
Soft Play used to be known as Slaves - yes, they were the ones who made this marvellous racket back in 2015...
They changed their name to Soft Play two years ago because, "The name 'Slaves' is an issue [and] doesn't represent who we are as people or what our music stands for any longer.", Also, they did it so that I can do a future edition of Namesakes all about bands called Slaves. So far, there are no other bands I can find called Soft Play.
Here's one of their more recent offerings, which is a little mellower than usual...
The name Heavy Jelly was also used by an early 70s prog-psych band from the UK featuring George Harrison's mate Jackie Lomax (who as also a member of Dee and the Dynamites, The Undertakers, The Lomax Alliance and Badger). Their eponymous debut album was never officially released due to a contract dispute with Apple, but it is available on the interweb...
Heavy Jelly was also the name of a 1968 rock band who were perhaps better known as Skip Bifferty...
And finally, record company moguls Simon Napier-Bell and Ray Singer also released a song under the band name Heavy Jelly back in 1968 which discogs categorises as "prog pop rock funk soul". All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put this one back together again...
Who'd ever have thought there was so much Heavy Jelly out there?
I couldn't let this series close without mentioning "the most amazing motion picture of our time", starring Michael Landon, presumably before he found God in Highway To Heaven...
Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was banned during the video nasties scare of the 80s, so it became something of a holy grail to teenage horror fans like myself, desperate to see it. When it was finally re-released in 1998, I rushed out to see it. The film does contain one of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen... yet it's nothing to do with the infamous chainsaw, or even Leatherface himself. Instead, the bit that got me was the dinner party scene when they fetch Grandpa down from the attic...
The Tyla Gang formed in 1975 following the dissolution of Sean Tyla's previous band, Ducks Deluxe. I suspect there's more than a whiff of bandwagonary going on here...
The other classic horror film banned throughout my adolescent video shop days was Mark Kermode's favourite: The Exorcist. Hard to believe it's 25 years since the censors finally allowed me to watch that...
The less said about the 2005 remake of House of Wax, starring Paris Hilton, the better. The 1953 original though, with Vincent Price, was one of the first mainstream Hollywood movies to be filmed in 3D. I generally hate 3D movies, but I reckon it'd be worth seeing this one again with the glasses on.
I found a whole bunch of songs named after this flick. Here's a smattering of wax on wax...
Nothing beats a good haunted house story for me though. And that one to beat in that genre is the 1963 version of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, known simply as The Haunting.
Whatever you do, do NOT watch the 1999 version with Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones. It's one of the worst films I've ever seen.
Here are some post-Shane Pogues... so no way as scary as they used to be.
Sadly, I couldn't find any songs named after the best haunted house movies of the 21st Century, the Paranormal Activity flicks, but I'm closing today with the film that got me hooked on horror movies back when I was a kid. I was obsessed with the Amityville Horror, reading all the books, watching all the films, and even looking favourably upon Lovebug Starski...
When I was a kid, I vividly remember the thrill of watching the old Universal horror movies late Saturday night on BBC2. You'd never see these classics on TV these days, and they're in danger of being airbrushed out of history for anyone other than ardent cinephiles... but we remember them today, starting with Victor (or Henry, as he was known in James Whales' film) Frankenstein and his monster, played by Boris Karloff...
That was the obvious tune, although curiously it only made it to Number 5 in My Top Ten Frankenstein Songs back in 2015...
Before you knew it, the Monster demanded a mate... in the form of Elsa Lanchester.
I couldn't immediately think of a song named after The Bride, but then I discovered New Zealand's Toy Love, who were on Flying Nun, so they had to be worth a listen. Here they are in 1980...
Todd Browning's Dracula was the first of many Universal films featuring the Lord of the Undead (and his family), although it's the only one to feature Bela Lugosi in the title role (unless you count his guest appearance in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). Despite that, Lugosi is the actor most often associated with the Count, even long after his death...
The direct sequel to Lugosi's Dracula featured Gloria Holden as Countess Marya Zaleska, aka Dracula's Daughter. Which leads us nicely to Colin Meloy and co....
More bandages were wrapped around Claude Rains in 1933... although when he took them off, he disappeared completely. There's loads of Invisible Man songs to choose from (see here), but this was the obvious choice, still one of Declan's finest album tracks...
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