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Forgotten Singles By Famous Bands/Singers

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The Roxy Music thread reminded me of Trash, a single with a video that’s fallen off the radar completely. 100k YouTube views compared with over 11million for Avalon.

Sometimes these forgotten cuts can shed more light on a band than some of their well known songs. A song that’s not a hit by a band that is used to having hits, can expose that band’s set of tricks or way of working a lot better than a track that is hugely familiar and successful. I have a low grade obsession with Queen’s Hot Space album. The video for Calling All Girls throws the band into the mix of a ridiculous Sci-Fi premise wherein they are the stars. The video is a damp squib, however they repeated the MO with the very next video they made: Radio GaGa. There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.

So any more of these parallel universe tracks?

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Comments

    • Superb acting from the band there. Made me think of Roger Taylor’s Strange Frontier video a few years later. Here it is below.

      There’s a story running through this but they seem to run out of ideas and the last minute and a half has him singing the song direct to camera in one shot. It’s like Hitchcock’s Rope but it seems much longer.

      • That felt a lot longer than it was. Poor Rog – a frustrated front man. I saw Queen + Adam Lambert a fortnight ago and we were “treated” to Roger coming out from behind the drums to sing “A Kind Of Magic”. He remained rooted to the spot, swinging his arm like a crooner. Then at the end he threw a tambourine straight up about 12ft into the air and then spectacularly failed to catch it when it came back down. I laughed a little too much.

  2. David Bowie’s When The Wind Blows. His soundtrack releases of 1986 were way better than the albums either side of that, but after the high/hype of Absolute Beginners at the start of the year (and Labyrinth in the middle), When The Wind Blows just about crawled into the charts. A fine song that deserved better.

  4. Kate Bush – There Goes a Tenner (1982)

    Completely ignored by the public. Sold about 37 copies. Staggered to no. 93 in the charts. Left off the “Whole Story” Greatest Hits album. Sung (partly) in a sort of weird cockney accent. A bit of an oddity, in other words.

  5. ELO’s Nightrider. It came in between the hits Evil Woman and Strange Magic. It’s from the Face The Music album. They even appeared on TOTP:

    The song just lacks any sort of magic, and I don’t think it helped letting Kelly Groucutt sing a bit of the lead vocal with his nasal voice. The album it comes from is 50% filler but it got them going in the UK.

    It’s the only ELO single from their golden years that failed to chart in any country.

  10. Maybe the obvious choice in a thread like this but Popscene by Blur?

    I remember seeing this on The Word and thinking it was ace and being totally shocked that the tedious southern baggie copyists who did “There’s No Other Way” were capable of this.

    Except then then did “Modern Life Is Rubbish” which I thought was rubbish, then “Parklife” (let us never mention this again) and it wasn’t till “Blur” where the spark they showed during “Popscene” came up again.

    I hated Blur, because I heard Popscene when it came out, and thought an interesting band got boring. I now think that both Damon and Graham might agree with me here…

    • “Popscene” is the first thing I thought of too.

      Blur do have another standalone single that gets a bit forgotten these days, despite making the top ten when it was released.

      (“Music Is My Radar” – Blur)

      It’s probably not their best work, but I rather like it.
      Then there’s the likes of “Bang” of course, which is deservedly forgotten.

      • For the record, I love Music Is My Radar. It’s probably more forgotten than Popscene because Popscene has gained an importance in their biography in retrospect. Whereas Music Is My Radar is really never mentioned at all. I think it marks the end of their imperial phase.

        • Under The Westway is one of my favourite Blur songs. Released as a proper vinyl single around the time of 2012 Olympics it has the same wasted genius of This Is A Low or End Of The Century. When performed at the Hyde Park concert on last day of the Games Damon was visibly moved as it drifted out into the London air. I sort of wish they had ended it there cos it was a perfect outro

          “When the flags coming down
          And the Last Post sounds
          Just like a love song
          For the way I feel about you
          Paradise not lost it’s in you
          On a permanent basis I apologize
          But I am going to sing

          Hallelujah
          Sing it out loud and sing it to you
          Am I lost out at sea
          ‘Til a tide washed me up off the Westway”

  11. The Kinks’ 60s catalogue is by now almost too well-known, but because ‘Shangri-La’ ( from the ‘Arthur’ album) was a flop on release in 1969 it was often passed over on compilations like ‘The Ultimate Collection’ in favor of the much weaker ‘Plastic Man’. Its ommision arguably misrepresents RD’s career at that time.

    https://youtu.be/Kt0IXkIVvo4

  12. Ian Dury and The Blockheads had a run of great singles, including a number one million seller and a number three. I Want To Be Straight introduced Wilco as a Blockhead, managed to reach number 22 in 1980 and is often overlooked in favour of the singles around it. Even so, it is brilliant, as is the video.

    • This is a perfect example of this kind of thing. You’ve reminded me that I started a thread with this song years ago wondering why some songs are hits, and some aren’t. Which is kinda what this thread is about. I love the band intros too.

  14. When Depeche Mode appeared as question on Pointless, they had “far too many pointless songs to list” so the majority of the output is less well-known, even though they were all technically “hit” songs. Much of their stuff since the 90s features guitars and drums. This is a song that gives a clue as to what they would sound like if they kept to the synth-only approach. Of course if Vince Clarke had stayed, they would sound like Erasure.

    https://youtu.be/uolAT4HqH5c

  15. Is this forgotten? No idea, but it was FP’s first single (not that they were ever really a singles band anyway), sank without trace and never appeared on any compilation until 2002’s Fairport Unconventional. It wasn’t on their first album either, although the b-side If (Stomp) was. It certainly gave no clue of what was to come – I only discovered relatively recently that it was a faithful cover of a 1940 Maxine Sullivan waxing. I actually bought it when it first came out, and amazingly I’ve still got it.
    https://youtu.be/bAfhLSHuDt0

  17. Basically everything (give or take a few) The Beach Boys released after Good Vibrations. Some of them forgotten for a reason, but some should be classics. This is one of them.

    Sunflower is one of their best albums, IMHO, released in 1970.

    • Great call. All those mid-eighties videos from Neil have a great charm about them. As celebrated as the Freedom album was, it seemed to mark the end of fun, idiosyncratic Neil and a return to the dreaded “back-to-basics”. The first Neil Young song/video I remember is Wonderin’ which had an ever-so-slightly unsettling look about it. Can’t find it on YouTube, but this is an interesting substitute nugget:
      https://youtu.be/ljd-R_sbbTM

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