90s Music Monday
Apparently #musicmonday is a trending topic on the Twitters - bunch of bloody Johnny Come Latelys. Some of us have been here every Monday morning (for various definitions of 'every', 'monday' and 'morning'), mining the rich vein of at-least-a-decade-old music for nuggets and gems to present you with. Although I'll concede that it may be closer to a family cat, possibly elderly and constantly smelling faintly of urine, 'presenting' you with a the mutilated carcass of a songbird than to a lover presenting you with a platter of the finest silks, gems and perfumes purchasable.
Either way - I forge on, secure in the knowledge that I'll be here long after those young whipper snappers have got tired and moved on to new things.
Anyway - my American friends will be blissfully unaware that for British soap operas are completely unlike their Yankee brethren. For a start there are no impossibly glamorous people or complicated plots involving hitherto unknown twin siblings, murders and lengthy comas. Or vampires. No British soaps, such as "East Enders" are mostly populated by grim, ugly people living grim, ugly lives in grim, ugly surroundings. See this comparison for example:
Anyway, when we want to import a little glamour we instead turned to two Australian soaps - "Neighbours" (24 years old this year) and "Home and Away" (22 years old this year). I mean, when I say glamour it's still no "Stairwells of Time" they're are still set in mundane locations - a Melbourne suburb and small, coastal town near Sydney respectively - after all, and the people them selves are pretty ordinary.
But they boast a startlingly accomplished and wide spread alumni amongst the cast. Probably the most famous, is of course, Ms Kylie Minogue, now so famous that her surname has withered and dropped off with disuse, like an unused appendix. Kylie played tomboyish greasemonkey Charlene Ramsey in Neighbours
Which is, to say, you probably didn't realise it but there are Australians everywhere. Do you really know your friends and neighbours? Do they ever casually "chuck" a "shrimp" on the "barbie"? Do you ever see them with faint traces on zinc on their noses? These and more may be an indication that you have an Australian infestation. You have been warned.
Anyway - so on to the main point of this increasingly rambling and incoherent post. 90s music. And Australians. Who were in soap operas.
Oh, look it's adorable elfin faced pixie Natalie Imbrugliagaliagala looking all quirky and alternative
Christ, bet you'd never thought you'd find a musical blog which mentioned Natalie Imbruglalalaiglia and Wolfsheim in the same post.
Anyway, somewhat little known fact - Ms Imbruglaglaglala didn't write (and by 'write' I mean, 'was given the song by one of the 5 pop composer supremos who secretely write about 90% of stuff that's in the charts these days') "Torn" it was originally a 1991 track by a Swedish band called Ednaswap
which was then covered by Danish singer Lis Sørensen as "Burnt" in 1993 (in Danish - listen to it, it will mildly freak you out)
Of course the best version ever done was Johann Lippowitz's mime version
Comments
I never did get it to look quite as alternative as hers, alas.
backing vocals on the Natalie Imbrugliaiaiaiaiola version - Katrina (and the Waves) Leskanich.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Leskanich