Hidden musical gems 1

Alright – Christopher Cross

Once called the Marie Provost of 1980s pop, & with his
James Corden meets Meatloaf looks, combined with a mismatched high voice he was
hardly going to be posterboy for the MTV generation.

While mostly remembered for the Bert Baccarach penned theme
to the Moore-Minelli-Mills vehicle Arthurs, much loved by generations of Radio
2 playlist compilers, Cross also recorded many other songs that appealed to
turn of the 1980s 30 somethings, such as the easy going Sailing & Michael
McDonald duo Ride Like The Wind.

Somewhere down the pecking order is Alright, with it’s perky
synth intro before the Flamingo logoed one gets into his stride, insisting
“it’s alright, I think we’re gonna make it” in a package that wouldn’t be out
of place as the end theme to a long forgotten American sitcom of the era.

Hidden musical gems - An Introduction

In the world of music there are many artists & songs who are known only to the more dedicated music fan, even if a song was a hit back in the day.

Even if you recognise the artist, the song might only be known to fans of artist, & certainly not to many playlist compilers of oldies radio stations.

Fans of specialist music genres will be familiar with knowing many songs that never could get near the mainstream without being used on a film / advert or plugged by a DJ.  Stranger things have happened over the years though!

Japanese music is a particular interest of mine, to I’ll go easy on it at the moment, but in future I’ll be giving it more coverage.

In it’s previous incarnation the very good pop culture site TV Cream compiled a list of it’s top 100 b-sides which unearthed many tracks that were unknown to me.  This list is not on the current site but I have an archived copy.

This list was partially the inspiration for this blog, though I’ll not be putting the entries in any particular order of preference, but will start them off in alphabetical order for convenience.

Where I can I’ll link to You Tube so you can have a listen yourself.

If this is successful enough I’ll start to do some entries for a different categories, notable covers is another area I’m thinking of, along with some mini-lists of more specialist material.