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(or “Does this mean anything to YOOOOOO?”)*
Not sure why, but I’ve recently been contemplating the above - one hit blunderers. Bands who, despite prolonged success, only ever had one blindingly good hit and are only remembered for that one good song (justifiably or otherwise). I’m not talking novelty songs or one-hit wonders, mind; I’ll give you some examples.
1) Ultravox; “Vienna” is one of the finest pop songs of all time - the electropop Bohemian Rhapsody. The rest of their output is more like cold haggis served up by a tiny man with thinning hair and a moustache. Called “Midge”.
2) Supergrass; despite over 10 years of album releases and tours, no-one - not even members of the band - is aware of the existence any song of theirs other than “Alright“.
3) Rainbow. Bastard offspring of Deep Purple and the newly-invented perm, they have trudged their way through TWENTY TWO albums. Almost all of it is bilge. “Since You Been Gone“, however, is astonishing; the hair-metal Bohemian Rhapsody. Ignore the little man on YouTube.
4) The Beatles. Aside from their astonishingly prescient paean to our fragile marine ecology “Octopus’s Garden”, they were crap, really, weren’t they?
So how about your nominations?
* - get the reference in the context of the piece for an easy 5 Sandwich points.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under General, or uncategorized due to sloppy editing, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great post Shit, but I’m reliably informed that Ultravox’s best track was in fact “My Sex” and “there are others too…. Vienna is mediocre in comparison…”
I will revert with further details and more comments in due course….
Does your info come from Fratello Pito, or from some other electro-encyclopaediac? I must admit, I’ve only listened to the best of Ultravox, and it was darned turgid.
“My Sex”, eh? Is that the same one that George Michael was after, I wonder? No wonder Midge Ure’s career took a nosedive…
Ultravox! were never the same after they unwisely dropped their exclamation mark! - fools! And original lead singer John Foxx was far less likely to put you off your tea than Midge Eughh!
Top tip - stop listening to droney old Vienna and check out ‘The Wild, The Beautiful and The Damned’ perhaps…?
Bienvenue, Fairy! Thanks for dropping by…. perhaps the reason that the Wah! stayed Mighty is that they never compromised on the exclamation mark…
The vibe I’m getting is that Ultravox’s pre-Ure-ine stuff was rather good… I confess complete ignorance, but, like a spotty 23-year-old NME twat journalist who thinks he knows it all now that he’s got a job with “Q”, I’ll give the debut album an enthusiastic listen (and probably a good review) simply because Brian Eno is involved.
Yes, welcome P Fairy and thanks for the extra info - saved me hours of further research….
Shit - great link !
I’d never noticed this whole use of the exclamation mark (or not) issue before - it reminds me that recently I was trying to explain what an exclamation mark was to my son (aged 4) - after several attempts I don’t think he really got it - maybe we’ll try again when he’s been at school a bit longer…. (but he DID understand about gravity and Isaac Newton so we’re making a degree of progress…..)
LZ, if you’re there, at some point a written explanation of the “?!” and/or “?!” would be useful so that I’m prepared for that awkward conversation, that is surely bound to happen in early teens or before, when my son sits me down and says “Dad, what’s an interrobang?!”….
Hope you enjoy your listen to the early tunes Monsieur Sandwich!
(By the way - Shitsandwich? - would that come with pickle?)
On matters of punctuation, does anyone know if using more than three dots together is technically wrong… ?
Anyway, this is the way this posting ends, not with an interrobang but a whimper…
Yo Fairy!
The title “Shit Sandwich” was intended as my personal tribute to Spinal Tap, but has instead served mostly to attract American coprophiles and, when I choose to abbreviate the site title, Nazi sympathisers. As such I’ll be changing the name fairly soon. I refer you to a previous post on the subject…
Our in-house consultant on all matters grammatical is Little Zoe, but she’s been rather quiet just recently, possibly because I been dissin’ her rhymes. And your final quotation is most apt, considering the “wasteland” this ‘blog has become recently (canned laughter….)
BTW - The reference for 5 points, which nobody got, was the chorus lyric from “Vienna” - “This Means Nothing to MEEEEEEE”
A belated ‘thank you’ for filling me in on the Sandwich front. I shall check out Spinal Tap some time soon… And I’d never heard of the term ‘coprophilia’ before, so I’m delighted that I’ve now researched the definition and, should it come up in the next pub quiz, can confidently pipe up ‘Chomping on the chocolate snake’ - So charming! Yes, your site is certainly very educational Mr Sandwich…
I was disappointed not to have been able to earn an ‘easy 5 Sandwich points’ in your vienna comp tho’. Will you be running any further competitions soon? Or, could I possibly be retrospectively awarded any ‘points’ for this instead ? -
Sandwich walks into a bar, barman says, “sorry, we don’t serve food in here”.
ho ho! Sorry, but I’m so glad I got that off my chest, points or no points…