Popular Nostalgia

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This Queen album, with the title track “A Kind of Magic” came out in 1986 – the video above is Freddie Mercury and Queen playing “A Kind of Magic” live at Budapest in that very year.
Queen were really rather good, weren’t they.
This track reminds me of my 1980s childhood perhaps more than any other.
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This track, Coco Jamboo, came out in 1996 courtesy of the German reggae style outfit known as “Mr President” – this was an instant summer classic which spun us round and round the waltzers in the summer of ‘96.
Another treasured memory.

This song will probably place you in a certain period of your life, at the dawn of a new Millennium, when things like the “Bomfunk MCs” were just a new group of people who you hadn’t really heard of.
The latter part is still true, but this track, “Freestyler” is one of those pieces of music [...]

This is a video of Wizzard performing the ultimate Christmas nostalgia track “I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day!” on Top of The Pops (another blast from the past since the BBC axed it a couple of years back!).
If it was Christmas every day, we’d probably all be alcoholic, fat and skint, but that’s [...]

Here’s some old school music that brings back a lot of memories for me.
Back when rap music was in its infancy, not everything was about b*tches, hoes and shooting G’s, no, it was about having 5 on it.
This is a belting classic, of that there is no doubt.
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Before Ben Elton made the hit musical We Will Rock You about a band called Queen, a band called Queen made the song We Will Rock You as one of their most popular track of many great tracks.
With their ebulient frontman, Freddie Mercury, Queen really were a phenomenon for many years – bridging the 70s, [...]

Released in 1966, “Reach Out I’ll Be There” epitomised the Tamla Motown era. Sung by Levi Stubbs, Renaldo Benson, Lawrence Peyton and Abdul Faki, the song took the US and UK by storm. They were shown round Britain by Beatles manager Brian Epstein. In Stubbs obituary, The Independent says: “The unusual arrangement [...]

This song was so blatant and rude, the kids loved it. Is it wrong that they played this at our school disco? Ten points to anyone who knows the dance. Careful though, this can get you jailed in some countries. Enjoy it and laugh one more time.
Lyrics to “Sex on the Beach”
Oh We Oh We [...]

Great proponents of the curtain hairstyle, the Backstreet Boys took the nineties by storm with their urban cool and increasingly complicated shaving regimes. Nick Carter was the pin-up boy of the decade and his little brother very almost succeeded in leeching of his success. I’ll always remember them for their catchy tunes and genuine harmonies. [...]

Apologies to those of you who rightly assume that I’ve just been mining a rich vain of 1995 tracks. I actually got a “Dance Tip ‘95″ cd for christmas one year (1995 would seem logical). Cotton Eye Joe was one of the tracks on that very Dance Tip ‘95 CD.
I never really liked it, but [...]

Freddie Mercury died before he could perform at the opening of the Barcelona Olympic Games but his favourite opera singer, Montserrat Caballe went onto perform a spine-tingling live version of the theme penned by Queen.

Vanilla Ice in hindsight seems laughably unfashionable, but I’m reasonably certain that at the time Ice Ice Baby came out and took the world by storm, the old V dog was pretty cool.
The baseline was stolen (out of court settlement apparently) from Queen’s “Under Pressure”, and apparently it might be questionable whether, er, Ice himself [...]

Barbie Girl by Aqua was a huge success, and despite the slightly silly words and light-hearted look of the video, this is an incredibly catchy and was really a la mode at the time it came out in the mid-late 90s.
Even the mums and dads liked Barbie Girl. Dads particularly enjoyed the video on Live [...]

The year was 1998. A good vintage for Bordeux. A very good vintage musically, for this was the year the world woke up and realised they had ears: every single piece of recorded or live music they had heard up until the point The Cartoons released Witch Doctor would soon be akin to white noise.
The [...]

The sound quality isn’t the best on this video, but I chose it because it showcases the best of sixties and seventies style. How did she get her hair so big? And check out the guy twisting around in the stripy tank top. Are those chops I spot? The flares and the silly dancing are [...]