O is for Oasis

Slip inside the eye of your mind. Don't you know you might find. A better place to play.

So begins Don't Look Back in Anger, one of my favorite Oasis songs. This track makes me think about the Nineties and about one of the decade's most profound dramas Our Friends in the North, as our heroes walked slowly away into obscurity under the bridges of the Tyne to the sound track of Oasis, their parts that dated back decades now over, the identities lost in the modern world.

Music appeared to reach its zenith in the Nineties and then it faded away. But we shouldn't look back in anger. It's a good philosophy for life. While I don't generally favor the Biblical turn the other cheek mentality that can be translated as 'bitch slap me until I'm blue in the face,' there's much to be said for just walking away and finding yourself in another place where nobody knows your name.

It's strange that this should be the Oasis song that strikes a cord with me the most because the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher appeared to look back in anger most of the time. Before turning back in anger and punching somebody in the face.

Oasis styled themselves on the Beatles, even if they were from the rival city of Manchester, rather than Liverpool. And for a while from 1994 to 1997 they were almost as big as the Beatles, before abruptly facing away.

Oasis had a raw and angry sound that seemed to come straight from the mean streets they grew up on. Their first hit Supersonic was taut and edgy. They were discovered by Creation Records co-owner Alan McGee, who invited them to play at King Tut's Wah Hut in Glasgow. Nobody recognized their name on the door but, by all accounts they bullied their way in, and stole the show.

Although Oasis were not originally seen as part of the Brit Pop movement, their epic battle with Blur for the Number One slot - primarily a media creation at the time - has forever associated them with the Brit Pop movement.

Blur's County House edged out Oasis' Roll With It. Oasis claimed there was a problem with the bar code on the single. Noel Gallagher later told a newspaper he hoped Damon Albarn and Alex James of Blur would "catch AIDS and die," later apologizing for the remark.

Noel Gallagher was the oldest and more sensible of the brothers.

His battles with his younger brother Liam, that often spilled over into violence, are the stuff of Oasis legend.

In 1994, for instance,  at a gig in LA, Liam,  under the influence of crystal meth, made offensive remarks about American audiences and assaulted Noel with a tambourine.

Oasis ultimately proved to be bigger than their nemesis Blur with an unprecedented run of 22 top 10 hits in the UK.

But they also went down faster and Blur's legacy remains stronger. The fame, mansions, swimming pools and girls, appeared to dull the edge of the Gallagher brothers and they lost their distinctive street fighting sound.

The Gallaghers did the normal band thing of splitting up and going solo. But they left a hell of a legacy. Let's hope they don't look back in anger.


Curious fact about Oasis - This hard edged northern band were named after a leisure center in southern Swindon of all places.

N is for New Order

When Blue Monday by New Order was in the charts, it spurred us on to develop the robot dance at school. I was passable but self conscious. Elicit cider supping helped. In contrast Pete was a dream in his white gloves. We would all form a circle while Pete worked his jerky moves. He was also a whizz on the running track.

Sadly Pete was in the slow lane in the classroom. I didn't stay in touch but could imagine him working in a packing factory or under a car. Then my imagination would kick in and I'd wonder if 20 years later, Blue Monday would be played on the radio one day and he'd wistfully remember when people formed a circle around him in his white gloves.

Or maybe I'm the only one who thinks that way and Pete forgot about Blue Monday years ago.

I'm not sure how big New Order were in the US, but they were ground breaking in Britain for a while with their electronic, industrial sound that was influenced by the German band Kraftwerk. And perhaps there were more sinister German influences at play.

Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris were originally members of Joy Division, a band whose gloomy sound was at odds with their name.

Lead singer Ian Curtis had suffered from ill health including bouts of epilepsy that sometimes took place on stage. Members of the audience wrongly though this was part of the act. Amid a marital breakdown he committed suicide in 1980.

The 1983 single Blue Monday became the best-selling independent 12 inch single of all time in the UK, the won;t mean a lot to people under a certain age. The general public were somewhat dischuffed to find it wasn't on the track list of the album Power, Corruption and Lies, resulting in a sticker appearing on unsold copies of the album that said: "DOES NOT CONTAIN BLUE MONDAY.

New Order and Factory Records were instrumental in setting up the famous Hacienda club in Manchester in the days when a wealth of alternative talent led to the city being dubbed "Madchester."


New Order - True Faith by hushhush112


True Faith became New Order's first American top 40 hit, although Ruined in a Day performed better stateside.

In more recent years New Order have done the usual band thing, namely splitting up and falling out. NME.com reported in July 2007 Hook had posted a message on his MySpace blog, claiming he would take steps to prevent Morris and Sumner to continue as New Order, writing "This group [New Order] has split up! You are no more New Order than I am! You may have two thirds, but don't assume you have the rights to do anything 'New Order-ey', because you don't. I've still got a third! But I'm open to negotiation."

They got together soon afterwards. Then split.

Curious face about New Order: Critics claimed the band had fascist undertones. The term "New Order" was featured in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf as "the new order of the Third Reich" while the name Joy Division originated from the prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in the 1955 novel The House of Dolls.

M is for Morrissey

Few artists have had such a profound influence on the zeitgeist as Morrissey. Few artists have managed to annoy people as much, once again proving the link between genius and spikiness.

Morrissey has been described by been described by music magazine New Musical Express as "one of the most influential artists ever," and The Independent has stated "most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status he has reached in his lifetime.

Steven Patrick Morrissey grew up in inner city Manchester and his lyrics reflect the crumbling streets, back-to-back houses and garbage strewn streets of a city where all it seems to do is rain.

Morrissey's influences seem to have been Coronation Street, James Dean and Oscar Wilde. He was a fan of the New York Dolls and briefly fronted the Nosebleeds before a meeting of minds and talents with Johnny Marr led to the creation of The Smiths in the 1980s.

From the outset The Smiths were different. In an age of synthesisers and gaudy clothes The Smiths were marvelously downbeat. Their first top 10 UK hit Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now contained the lyric: "I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I'm miserable now."

Seriously. We can all relate to that lyric.

A previous single What Difference Does it Make? only reached number 12 which is surprising considering it's one of the best tracks in the history of forever. In my unbiased opinion.

Morrissey's uncompromising vegetarian PETA-loving credentials were set out in the title of the 1985 album Meat is Murder, a song that coincidentally busted my first and only clandestine teenage party.

My parents were away and we decided to hold a party. We may have got away with it had two diehard Smiths fans wearing Meat is Murder T-shirts not tipped out all of our milk in the coat closet by way of protest. That took some explaining.

The album The Queen is Dead coincided with my departure for university which was handy because it meant I could hang Smiths posters in my room and could listen to their mournful lyrics on a student downer which occurred at least twice a week:

And now I know how Joan of Arc felt
Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
As the flames rose to her roman nose
And her Walkman started to melt

Morrissey later upgraded the lyric at a concert, replacing "walkman" with iPod, apprently, although, to be fair, Joan of Arc may have had more pressing concerns that her iTunes playlist as she was burned at the stake.

Inevitably Morrissey and Marr fell out and Morrissey went solo in the late 1980s, recording some memorable songs including Suedehead, Every Day is Like Sunday, The Last of the International Playboys and The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get.

Morrissey's musical industry feuds and political controversies are legendary. In a 1984 interview, he said of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "She is only one person. She can be destroyed. It is the only remedy for this country at the moment." His first solo album, Viva Hate, included a track entitled "Margaret on the Guillotine."

In 2010, despite a the previous feud, he supported Marr, when he forbade British Prime Minister, David Cameron, another Conservative, from liking the Smiths. Morrissey said: "I would like to, if I may, offer support to Johnny Marr who has spoken out to the media this week against David Cameron. David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence."

There have been the extreme animal rights comments and allegations of racism that coincided when he said of the Chinese. "Youcan't help but feel the Chinese are a sub-species." He was referring to China's record on animal rights.

In 2011 in the wake of the Norwegian massacre Morrissey said: "We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 [sic] dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Shit every day."

These kinds of comments raise the distinct possibility that Morrissey may be a bit of a jerk. But at least he's a jerk that sounds good.

Curious fact about Morrissey - he worked for the Inland Revenue for a while but was so unimpressed with the job he decided to go on the dole instead.

L is for Lennox

I'm happy to report my blog posting on the Kinks was picked up by a Kinks website and has received hundreds of hits today.

Other than my brief jubilation at this minor blimp in the numbers game I have little else to celebrate but a night of beers with a pal may sort this out.

Before that there's the small problem of L; more like Ell. There is a serious shortage of decent artists beginning with L. I was beginning to despair until I remembered Annie.

Annie Lennox is like the alter ego of Madonna. She's also very talented but instead of being self centered she does lots of things for good causes and everybody loves her. It's funny that when Sting talks about the rain forest and Bono from U2 bangs on about world poverty, they sound like sanctimonious gits. But Annie Lennox can never put a foot wrong.

Like many of the featured artists she was born into a degree of poverty. Her father was a shipyard worker and her mother was a nurse and the lived in a two roomed apartment with shared washing facilities. It was upstanding Scottish poverty rather than the kind of moral wasteland Jimi Hendrix was born into - see H is for Hendrix.

In the 1970s Annie joined forces with Dave Stewart to form The Tourists, She was in a relationship with him initially. That didn't stop her forming Eurythmics with her ex and the band went on to dominate the eighties with hits such as Love is a Stranger, Who's That Girl, Here Comes the Rain Again and Sweet Dreams.

As demonstrated by the video for Love is a Stranger, Lennox took on an androgynous look, at times looking like Bowie and at other times a femme fatale.

In the early 1990s Lennox embarked on an equally successful solo career that spawned hits such as Why, Walking on Broken Glass and No More I Love Yous.

Lennox has been a public supporter of a number of charities for many years including Amnesty International and Greenpeace and she and Dave Stewart donated all of the profits from Eurythmics' 1999 Peacetour to both charities.

In 2006, in response to her humanitarian work, Lennox became the patron of the Master's Course in Humanitarian and Development Practice for Oxford Brookes University. In 2006, she addressed Members of Parliament in the UK about the need for children in the UK to help their counterparts in Africa.

Curious fact about Annie Lennox - her first marriage was to  a German Hare Krishna devotee Radha Raman. It lasted just a year from 1984 to 1985.

K is for Kinks

Back at school no school disco was complete without "Big Roger's stomp." Roger was a hard drinking, serially disaffected English teacher who could be funny at times even if his stock joke "Do you like Dickens? I've never been to one." was met with a wall of classroom silence every time he told it.

At the cheesy affairs that were otherwise known as school discos, whenever You Really Got Me by the Kinks was put on the turntable, the dance floor would clear and Big Roger would appear and proceed to dance a frenzied stomp that defied all description in menacing ever decreasing circles. The record would switch to Satisfaction by the Stones and Big Roger would up the tempo, if that was even possible, running the risk of shattering the dance floor and his tibia with his movements.

Years later I was drinking in the work social club on the first day of my new job wondering what the hell I was doing. The news editor, who had told me "the most important thing we do here is have fun," was slumped gloomily over a pint of heavy, suggesting today's paper was "utter shite." He seemed less than impressed that I had failed to grasp the intricacies of local government reorganization on my first day on the job.

Then a strange thing happened. Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks came on and suddenly my morose mustachioed boss was transformed. coming over all misty eyed at some memory related to the song that I didn't want to know about.

Although The Kinks were in their heyday some time before me, these episodes illustrated how they had a habit of appearing in my life. The Kinks can be like that. The band was mould breaking and anyone familiar with The Kinks has a favorite track.

The Kinks were labelled a "British invasion" band in the US. The band was formed in 1964 by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in Muswell Hill, London. It seems Ray and Dave had the kind of parents we all wished for but so few of us got. In the unpromisingly suburban surroundings of north London, Frederick and Annie Davies held all night rock and roll parties that inspired their offspring to form a band.

The band was originally called The Ravens but changed their name to The Kinks in 1963. Manager Robert Wace recalled a friend had advised him the risque name would be a good way of getting publicity. Band members were horrified about a name that suggested they were in some way deviant.  "I've never really liked the name," Ray stated.

You Really Got Me in was released in 1964. It was boosted by a performance on the television show Ready Steady Go. It reached number one in the UK and number 10 in the US.

The Kinks acquired something of a reputation for on stage rowdiness afer an incident in Cardiff in 1965 in which Dave Davies insulted the drummer Mick Avory and kicked over his drum set. Avory hit Davies with his hi-hat stand, leaving him unconscious, before fleeing from the scene, fearing that he had killed him. Davies received 16 stitches to his head at the hospital.

Such behavior may explain why the American Federation of Musicians refused permits for the group to appear in US concerts for four years.

In the 1965 record See My Friends written by Ray Davies the band integrated Indian raga sounds into their music before the Beatles did the same thing. Later the band took on an increasingly theatrical aspect, which also has parallels with The Beatles.

The 1967 record Waterloo Sunset is one of the most enduring tracks from The Kinks. The dreamy feel of the track has always appealed to me. Waterloo station is a vast terminus surrounded by decay and disorder, tower blocks and ring roads. Waterloo Sunset hints at escapism and loneliness in the vastness of London.

The song describes two lovers walking over a bridge, with a melancholic observer reflecting on the them. The song was rumoured to have been inspired by the romance between actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. Ray Davies denied this in his autobiography, and later said: "It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country."

By 1973 there was little romance left between Ray Davies and his wife Rasa, who took their children and left him. The lead singer's depression led  to a public outburst during a gig in London where a reviewer said he he swore that he was "sick of the whole thing'. ... He was "sick up to here with it. "At the end of the show he declared he was quitting, kissed Dave Davies on the cheek and collapsed from a drug overdose.

The incident clearly provided a decent scoop for the reporter from Melody Maker. Fortunately, Davies lived but The Kinks faded out like the bittersweet melody of Waterloo Sunset, although their legacy lived on in numerous bands who re-recorded their songs.

Curious fact about The Kinks - in the early 1960s they tried out a number of vocalists including Rod Stewart, who was unknown at the time.

J is for Japan

J has cut me up because I've only left myself an hour of Wednesday and I am missing the days of two blog postings a week and I haven't had time to acknowledge all of you fab people who have commented.

J is also tearing me up because I had a Howard Jones phase, but Tom Jones is a God, even if the idea of throwing under garments at someone icks me out. And Norah Jones sounded nice for a while back there.

And while I didn't like The Jam a lot at the time after Weller declared he would vote Conservative, it turns out the marketing people has told him to say that. In retrospect I love their angry but controlled sound.

Japan, in contrast seem to be pale faced pretty boys who were in on the early cusp of the New Romantic movement in the early 1980s, although they distanced themselves from it before fading away. They never made it big in America.

But even today their elegant sound stands the test of time. They are considered and clever and age like a fine wine or the painting of an impressionist with its subtle pastel undertones. For a while I had a double album of Exorcising Ghosts complete with pretty water colors on the sleeve. CDs killed vinyl but there's something aesthetically beautiful about the appearance of an album like that. There's something beautiful about Japan too.

Nobody died of a drug overdose but bassist Mick Karn died of cancer in 2011. And lead singer David Sylvian made a few pretty sounding albums about trees before fading into obscurity. Funny to think such beauty could come out of Catford.

Curious fact about Japan - the band was,in fact, big in Japan.

I is for INXS

Let's face it possums, as Dame Edna might say, we all want to visit Australia. But has anything cool ever come out of the place?

Although cities like Sydney may be cosmopolitan, it seems to be an exception to the rule. The stereotypical view of Australia involves red earth, flies, spiders that attack you from the toilets in the outback and Crocodile Dundee types who don't take kindly to Sheilas in their bars.

INXS were clearly an exception to the rule, although they started off life with the less than cool name the Farriss Brothers.

A name change and the lead singer Michael Hutchence changed all of that. "Hutchence was the archetypal rock showman. He exuded an overtly sexual, macho cool with his flowing locks, and lithe and exuberant stage movements," commented rock music historian Ian McFarlane.

When he dated Kylie Minogue it was the nearest Australia had to a celeb couple. He also dated the model Helena Christensen.

Hits included Need You Tonight, Never Tear Us Apart, Disappear and Suicide Blonde.

The band, or at least the volatile Hutchence - was undone by a suicide blonde. Paula Yates, the infamous British TV presenter and rock chick first met him on her sofa on Channel 4's rock magazine program The Tube in 1985.

Being married to Bob Geldof didn't stop Paula stalking Hutchence with a vengeance for a decade until she finally got her man.

Geldof and Paula already had three kids - Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom and Little Pixie. Paula and Hutchence felt they had to have their own daughter with a silly name and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence (known as 'Tiger') was born in July 1996.

There was no happy ending. Apparently, missing his child Hutchence committed suicide in 2007. Yates bitterly contested the verdict, arguing Hutchence was seeking sexual gratificaiton by hanging himself with a belt in his hotel room - perhaps the first time in history somebody has tried to argue auto erotic strangulation as a more preferable way to go.

It seems that rather a lot of the artists featured in this A-Z challenge have met premature ends. Inevitably Yates later died of a drug overdose.

Curious fact about INXS - The name INXS was inspired by the English band XTC and Australian jam makers IXL. Which is only slightly less glamorous than being named after a fish canning company. See A is for ABBA.

H is for Hendrix

When Jimi Hendrix played a psychedelic version of The Star Spangled Banner at a muddy music festival called Woodstock in 1969 the moment became forever fixed in the imagery of the sixties along with B-52s raining bombs on the paddy fields.

The rendition was interpreted by some as an anti war statement but the guitar guru himself was more cryptic.

We're all Americans. . .it was like 'Go America!'. . .We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, see," he said.

Although his fiinale is interpreted as the highlight of Woodstock, the video of the time makes it clear the crowd wasn't large. Hendrix didn't like performing in front of massive crowds and pushed back his performance to early in the morning on day four. Even the effects of LSD can only fortify festival goers from the effects of mud, little food and overflowing toilets for so long. The crowd had thinned from about 400,000 people to a tenth of that number by the time Hendrix took to the stage.

Those who saw him felt they were part of history but still the American bombs and burning napalm fell on an obscure corner of South East Asia. Hendrix himself would be dead in just over a year.

Like Elvis who he idolized for a while, Jimi Hendrix grew up in abject poverty. It's impossible to do justice to him in a short blog posting.

The man who would later be acclaimed as the world's greatest electric guitarist was born in Seattle of African American, European and Native American ancestry. His upbringing in cheap hotels, sprinkled with acts of random violence and abuse reads like a Tennessee Williams play.

Hendrix went on to forge a reputation a as great guitarist and the wild man of the sixties. Hendrix made his name in London where he hobnobbed with the Beatles and the Stones and formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Hendrix made a mark with his distinctive fashion sense and his party piece of smashing up his guitar and setting fire to it at the end of his performances.

Hendrix's death proved that sinister things happen in Notting Hill as well as fop haired idiots who run bookshops falling for humorless American actresses. Jimi Hendrix died in the Notting Hill flat of then girlfriend Monika Dannemann on September 18, 1970.

Although Hendrix was known to take psychedelic drugs it appears he had taken nine of his girlfriend's sleeping pills not realizing they were a very strong Belgian brand. It seems Belgium was to blame for the death of the world's greatest electric guitarist as well as the brutality of the Congo.

Numerous conspiracy theories fly about Hendrix's death. The doctor who attended him was later reprimanded for medical malpractice. He reported the presence of red wine that was inconsistent with the autopsy. Monika Dannemann was accused of failing to treat him and another book said a former manager plotted his death because Hendrix was about to pull out of a contract.

Dannemann committed suicide in the 1990s after she was found guilty of contempt of court for repeating a libel against Kathy Etchingham, who had been a girlfriend of Hendrix in the 1960s.

Sadly the Jimi Hendrix experience did not end up well for anybody, but at least his distinctive sound remains as a legacy to an era that seems so fast moving at times, it was very easy to fall out of it. Hendrix must be one of the few people to have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame and a blue plaque from English Heritage in London.

Curious fact about Jimi Hendrix - his father had six fingers on both hands.

G is for Garbage

For a band named after a stinking pile of compost Garbage seem to have done rather well for themselves. A bit grungy with a pop edge and a Scots-American composition, Garbage were one of the bands that gave the Nineties its distinctive sound.

They have had something of a revival in recent years and appear to be a hot-ish commodity again.

Garbage were formed in Madison, Wisconsin in 1994. American musicians Duke Erikson (bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion), Steve Marker (guitar, keyboards) and Butch Vig (drums, percussion) auditioned for a woman to front the band and settled on Shirley Manson, a fiery Scottish redhead who says fuck a lot.

I first heard Garbage through Stupid Girl, during the nineties but people were too fixated on Blur and Oasis back then to give Garbage much attention.

Looking back there were rather a lot of good tracks such as Milk, Special and You Look so Fine. You can still sometimes hear Garbage today in places like malls in America so they clearly have some staying power.

In a March 2012 interview with Vanity Fair Manson suggests bands and artists are so abysmally pants these days - my words not hers - because everyone is scared post 9/11. I don't know if this is the reason or if I'm just dismissive about new stuff because I'm old, but it sounds like an interesting theory.

"It’s a post-September 11 thing, where we have been living essentially in wartime. People are fearful and are unable to articulate their fear, so it’s buried under the carpet. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve had a proliferation of happy pop music, to buoy one’s spirits and make everyone feel safe," she said.

Or maybe it's because someone let Simon Cowell rule the world.

In another exert from the Vanity Fair interview Manson says: "Now everything has fallen back down a little, and it’s almost like the Mad Men era, where women are supposed to be perfect. They can do their job, but they have to have children and they have to be good moms and they have to look pretty at all times and they have to be always smiling and it must be fucking exhausting."

Manson, who has also been cast in some acting roles seems to have a rather pragmatic view of the world. Still you are unlikely to get carried away with yourself if you spend half of the time half freezing to death in Scotland and the other half of the time in chilly Madison, Wisconsin.

Curious fact about Garbage - Manson described her first session with the other band members as a "disaster" and said both herself and the other band members were "totally uncomfortable" with the situation.

F is for Frankie Goes to Hollywood

(oh no - people in Australia have already written G)

Frankie Goes to Hollywood may not be the biggest band of all time. But they had one of the biggest and most controversial hits.

The Frankie saga is a cautionary tale about censorship not to mention sex and bondage.

The group's debut single Relax had crept up to Number 6 in the charts in 1984 when the BBC Radio 1 disc jockey Mike Read took a closer look at the front cover design on the record and got his knickers in a twist.

The DJ was appalled at the "overtly sexual" nature of the record sleeve and the printed lyrics, which prompted him to remove the disc from the turntable live on air, branding it "obscene."

For younger readers a turntable is... oh never mind.

Two days later, even though the record had been played for a couple of months, the BBC decided to ban it from all its radio stations and other outlets. Somebody had picked up on the fact Relax contained a reference to ejaculation.

The ban meant uninitiated folks like myself who had never heard of Relax suddenly knew all about it. Predictably the single shot to Number One in the charts and stayed there for five weeks becoming the biggest selling single of the year after Band Aid.

For week after week it seemed when the chart show got to the Number One slot the DJ would start clearing his throat a lot and sounding shifty before explaining he couldn't play the Number One hit because it was banned.

The video was banned by the BBC and MTV. Perhaps the case for banning the video was slightly stronger than the single.

The video is described thus by Wikipedia: "The original video ...depicted a gay S&M parlor where the bandmembers were admired by muscular leathermen, a bleached blonde drag queen and a large-bodied gentleman dressed as a Roman emperor. The video featured a scene where one of the bandmembers wrestled a live tiger, to the admiration of the clubgoers, and ended where the "emperor" was so excited he shimmied out of his toga."

There was a substitute version. I'm not even sure which one I'm posting here. The tame on I think. Relax became the seventh best selling single of all time. It was followed by two other Number Ones - Two Tribes and The Power of Love, before the outrageous boys from Liverpool faded out.

While Relax is a good dance track I'm not sure it deserved the mass sales it achieved. But it certainly left the folks at the Beeb looking straight laced and a bit like the authorities that banned Lady Chatterley's Lover back in the day.

Even American radio stations play Relax from time to time and I don't think they bleep out the offending word, although if the Beeb had such a problem with Relax I don't see why they couldn't have bleeped out one word like American stations do when Alanis Morissette sings: "Are you thinking of me when you bleep her?"

Curious fact Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Frankie's fourth single Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in March 1985, was promoted before its release as "their fourth number one." In the event Frankie fans didn't think it was worth shimmying out of their togas for and it only reached Number Two.

E is for Elvis

The couple of hours left of E is not enough time to do justice to Elvis, the King of Rock 'n' Roll who was more of a cultural icon than anybody before or since.

There's a Talking Heads lyric: "One day you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack." Elvis didn't have to wait. He was born into one in Tupelo, Mississippi.

There can be few less promising places to rise to stardom from. Elvis was said to be mediocre at music at school but he was inseparable from his guitar. When his family moved to Memphis, occupying rooms in boarding houses, the influence of the musical Mecca, rubbed off on Presley.

Elvis ushered in a new age of music and his matinee good looks and gyrating moves ensured he became the first global teen idol.

Britain is often hailed as the home of cool music but in the 1950s and early 1960s British youth looked wistfully west and had to make do with Cliff Richard closer to home, a singer who would years later have a Number One hit called Mistletoe and Wine. Enough said.

Elvis was also launched into movies with dizzying results. The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly frenzied. One commentator recalled, "He'd start out, 'You ain't nothin' but a Hound Dog,' and they'd just go to pieces."

If Elvis was the world's first superstar he also had a classic superstar downfall. Ruined by wealth and a failed marriage to Priscilla he became increasingly dependent on a cocktail of drugs. There are tales about Elvis ordering dozens of hamburgers a day and shooting TV sets to liven up his miserable existence.

By the early 1970s the idol had become a huge and grotesque mockery of himself. Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring."

There are now two personas of Elvis in the public imagination; the energetic young crooner and the big bejeweled Elvis with heavy dark glasses so beloved of Elvis impersonators. There didn't seem to be an in between Elvis.

Elvis died in 1977 and his home at Graceland instantly became a shrine. Later there was an unsuccessful attempt to steal his body.

Elvis' life and death should have been a clear lesson to all of those who came after him. But it's not one that the Amy Winehouses, Michael Jacksons and Whitney Houstons of later years, chose to heed.

Curious fact about Elvis: He had an identical twin brother who was stillborn at birth. It's curious to think what would have happened had he lived. Would he have made a living as an Elvis body double?