I was beside myself with joy the other day to finally track down The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Top Five hit of 1981 Hooked On Classics.
Nothing more than a few light classics/advert favourites backed by a handclap drumbeat. Needless to say it works. It was a front-runner in the medley craze of 1981, striking big as the fad really took a hold.
The first - and best - of these was of course Stars On 45, the Dutch studio group who came up with the genius idea of putting snippets of Beatles songs to a beat, bookended by some fine Europop that had us all reaching the same conclusion: Yes, the Stars on 45 did indeed keep on turnin' in our mind.
I realised recently that a lot of the Beatles songs in this track I'd never actually heard until I heard Stars On 45. In fact I was rather disappointed to discover We Can Work It Out and Do You Want To Know A Secret didn't come with handclaps. They might have been even better if they had. You can't beat handclaps, they make everything go with such a swing. I don't know why they've fallen out of favour.
Anyhoo, doing a bit of Stars On 45 digging looking for the follow ups (Stars On Stevie and the Abba one with no name) I came across this 1982 Dutch No.1 Stars On 45 Proudly Presents The Star Sisters, in which faceless backing singers do a medley of things like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and In The Mood, beating Jive Bunny by seven years. I had to download it. It's not all that.
And look, not really faceless at all!
So why did that craze fizzle out? Too many of them? Medley fatigue must have set in. Looking through the charts for 1981 there were thousands of them, from Beach Boy Gold to Pump Up The Bitter to Bras On 45 to Holliedaze to Back To The Sixties parts 1 and 2 and more. Enough already! We probably thought that instead of bits of songs, let's just have whole ones instead.
They carried on for ages in Europe, so perhaps where pop is king it wasn't such an issue. But despite Jive Bunny's many hits the medley has all but died out. Orange Juice do a good one, Blokes On 45, in which they sing bits of their hits over a disco beat, thereby proving that all medley records were essentially identical, but no worse for that.
Anyway, here's Lobo (not that one) to remind you of those salad daze.
