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I was driving in the car the other day when Joe Le Taxi by Vanessa Paradis suddenly came on the radio. I had forgotten all about this song until then, and hearing it again instantly took me back to my childhood, with memories of looking up the lyrics in my sisters copy of Smash Hits.
Joe Le Taxi hit number 3 in the UK charts when it was released at the beginning of 1988, but what is most surprising about this fact is that the song (as the title suggests) was sung in French, meaning most of us in the UK didn’t really have much of a clue as to what the song was saying, other than it was presumably about a taxi driver named Joe who liked the saxophone.
However, it was a very catchy song that you ended up humming or singing along with, despite not knowing what the words meant, so it was nice to see a song do well in the charts because people presumably must have really liked it.
Another surprising fact is that the singer, Vanessa Paradis, was only fourteen at the time, and this wasn’t even her first released song – that honour went to La Magie des surprises-parties (my French is not great but I’m guessing that’s The Magic of Surprise Parties) which was released in 1983, so she must have been just ten for that song!
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School trips were always fun for several reasons. First, it always seemed like a day off school. Secondly, you sometimes got to go to some interesting places. Thirdly, the coach trip often descended into what can only be described as mayhem! Fun mayhem that is!
99 Red Balloons was a number one hit for Nena, which was both the name of the female singer of the song and her band too, in February 1984. This was the English translation of the original German version, which was called 99 Luftballons, and between the two versions Nena managed to achieve the number one slot in the charts in at least ten countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and home country Germany.
It was the mid eighties when the BBC launched their soap opera EastEnders with much fanfare, causing my Mum and mothers across the land to tune in eagerly for a dose of market trading folk from a small London suburb. Such was the popularity of the show back then that the characters who made up the original cast are still fondly remembered today.
If you take a perusal of the songs I’ve featured in the Music – Songs category of this site you’ll soon realise that most, if not all, are novelty songs of some kind or another. Part of the reason for this is that as a kid I was never really into music in a big way, and certainly wasn’t a fan of any one band in particular, so the songs which I tend to remember most vividly, perhaps regrettably, are the rather less serious ones.
Stutter Rap was the only hit for comedy rap group Morris Minor and the Majors, a British parody of the Beastie Boys. Where the Beastie Boys were famous for wearing the Volkswagen logo, unsurprising the singers of Stutter Rap favoured the rather more old fashioned (but quintisentially British) Morris Minor.
“19″ by Paul Hardcastle is a track that everybody who was around in the 1980’s must surely recognise and remember. It was released in 1985 and took the UK chart by storm, staying at number one for 5 weeks. It also enjoyed a stint at the top of the charts in many other countries including Austria, Germany, Italy and New Zealand, and more besides.
The late eighties saw many pop records starting to use more electronic methods of music production over the more traditional methods of playing a musical instrument into a microphone. Synthesisers, drum machines and music sequencers became common place and meant that people could now create music more easily, without having to spend years learning to play piano or guitar first.
