crappy big hits from across the decades

[naughty boy]

what's yer fave?

[Loki]

Never heard any Roussos tunes before, but recognize him and his voice from Aphrodite's Child. This sounds very Euro.


I have to go for HH. My niece loves that song.

[Charlie O.]

Like Loki's niece and all other right-thinking people, I love "I'm Into Something Good".

And I don't mind "True" terribly much.

You can keep the other two - especially the Verve one.

[Bent Fabric]

I really like "True" a lot.

But...God, the Verve were an absolute fucking hoax if ever there was one.

[Ranking Ted]

Herman’s Hermits are awful, a square’s idea of “swinging 60s”, the kind of clueless wedding DJ, office party dreck that makes you want to hear the Revolting Cocks. I actually had the misfortune to hear Demis and his aural kaftan on Gambo’s Pick Of The Pops yesterday, probably the first time since it was out. It’s utter shit. The Spands’ faux soul epic, almost certainly the song of “Woo” Gary Davies’ dreams, is, once you clear your mind of the horrendous suits in the video, the smugness of “great songwriter” Gary Kemp and Tony Hadley’s vocal contortions, is easily the least offensive here. I’ve ranted about the vacuous, billowing, utterly useless “The” Verve before. Suffice to say, time hasn’t conferred new depth to their tuneless doggerel.

Ver Spands!

[Dayodead]

1.Cheese
2.Not sure what the hell is going on with this one..Not sure I want to know...
3.Ultra Cheese
4.meh...

[Rayge]

Never heard any Roussos tunes before, but recognize him and his voice from Aphrodite's Child. This sounds very Euro.


I have to go for HH. My niece loves that song.

Has she heard this version, Steff?



Earl Jean was the lead singer with the Cookies. I think that's Carole King on the piano.

[The Modernist]

The Herman's Hermits track is a sparky tune, but is let down by a flat Merseybeat arrangement (...yes I know they were from Manchester). You could imagine it done by The Beach Boys though and sounding great.
The Verve track gets heard far too often and I'm now bored of it, but I really liked it for a couple of years. Doesn't deserve the scorn it's getting on here.
The other two deserve all the brickbats you can throw.

[Matt Wilson]

1, 3 & 4 are all okay. Don't think I've heard the second song, because I'm too scared to watch that video.

[naughty boy]

The more recent, the more I like it. I mean, Richard Ashcroft is nothing at all but a pair of shades, and his stinking band didn't deserve any kind of success, but there's something groovy going on in that thing.

'True' is OK, might even be good, but the icky sax solo and the stuffed shirt Hadley take it down a few notches.

Demis is fine - where's Quaco?

and the HH effort is just ridiculous, childish chipmunk pop.

[Matt Wilson]

Well, if even the hard-to-please Coan says Demis is fine - I tried to give it a shot.

I lasted ten seconds.

[naughty boy]

Oh it's all tied up in childhood memories of holidays near the sea and so forth, Matt. But I do like it.

[Phenomenal Cat]

I like Demis. A sweet man. The rest have already taken up enough of our time.

[The Red Heifer]

Like Loki's niece and all other right-thinking people, I love "I'm Into Something Good".

And I don't mind "True" terribly much.

You can keep the other two - especially the Verve one.

This is where I roughly land. I absolutely fucking loathe Bittersweet Symphony.

[Ranking Ted]

Richard Ashcroft is nothing at all but a pair of shades, and his stinking band didn't deserve any kind of success, but there's something groovy going on in that thing.

I agree - its the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra sample. It made Ashcroft's typically unfocused bombast bearable the first billion times I heard it. Its really hard to remove the baggage that track (by some distance, the best thing they managed to come up with, save me from the Mad Richard years too) has accumulated now to get back to the place where it didn't offend me (which it didn't, in more innocent times).

[zoomboogity]

Herman's Hermits, one of those "peaked too soon" bands. I mean, after I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am, where do you go from there?

[Loki]

Never heard any Roussos tunes before, but recognize him and his voice from Aphrodite's Child. This sounds very Euro.


I have to go for HH. My niece loves that song.

Has she heard this version, Steff?

Doubtful. I think she would like it.

[toomanyhatz]

The more recent, the more I like it.

Opposite for me. HH is cloying and gleaming and goofy as hell, but there are times when it's worth surrendering yourself to it. The band is certainly underrated, even when Herman's too chirpy.

The Demis is - well, it just is, isn't it? Nothing half-assed about it. I could see Ferry doing something like this and making a parody of it, but there's something about his willingness to be that brazenly grandiose. That high-pitched vibrato, I mean - what else are you going to do with that?

"True" is a fine song, but - stop me if you've heard this one before - makes an unpleasant noise to my ear. It almost has a bit of a groove till the vocals choke it, then the sax solo grinds it into a fine powder.

The less said about the appropriately-initialed BS the better. And believe it or not, I've never seen the video before. I have absolutely no idea what that's supposed to be about or why. Some self-realization that he's in his own world and completely oblivious to how foolish he looks? One can only hope...

[fange]

I honestly don't get the aggressive hatred that people around here have for 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'. Sure, Ashcroft was a dick; but the song itself is a catchy bit of late-90s pop/rock that was WAY too overplayed but hardly excremental.

It was the least interesting single from the least interesting album they ever did, in fact, but it still has hit written all over it. I was, and still am, a big fan of their early singles and debut LP - excellent '90s psychedelic guitar rock. It's a shame that people seem blinkered to them by something i don't quite understand.

Anyway, the other 3 - 'Something Tells Me...' is just a harmless little '60s pop tune, a bit meh in the end, but as Moddie suggests it could have been greater in more capable hands. 'True' is way too overblown for my tastes, pompous '80s pop-soul, the kind that got eaten up my the record-buying masses of the time. The band's first couple of singles were ok, but this one is a huge wet lettuce leaf. That Demis is a song i hated vehemently at the time i was growing up - it is SO sugary and over-produced with almost no backbone at all - but i've softened a little towards it in my old age. Now it just gets on my nerves a bit.

[Charlie O.]

I honestly don't get the aggressive hatred that people around here have for 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'. Sure, Ashcroft was a dick; but the song itself is a catchy bit of late-90s pop/rock that was WAY too overplayed but hardly excremental.

It has exactly ONE hook - a stolen one at that - and it's really only a hook because it's driven into the ground, to the point where I for one thought it was "WAY too overplayed" after the first time. Is the singer saying anything worth saying? Not that I can tell. Did you guys who liked it at the time think it was profound or moving or something?