Popular Nostalgia

As my name suggests, I was born in the early 80s, the things I write about will be late 80s onwards. Pretty much my earliest coherent memories are of Italia 90, which gives you some clues! I'm English. I'll update this profile bit some more soon!

Strike a pose and dance like Madonna. Arms all over the place. You can now even go and dance to 80′s music in a modified nightclub aerobics class. Everyone’s done it and there are a thousand Youtube spin-offs of the complicated mime-style poses which make up the Vogue dance. The difference between Vogue and other [...]

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 [...]

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.

I remember Potsworth & Co. with fondness from my childhood, but a look back at the video shows that, compared to today’s cartoons, it was a pretty budget affair, which relied on good storylines. In the USA, it was called Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone – what a mouthful! Potsworth & Co. is [...]

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 [...]

I can’t believe we haven’t had The Raccoons featured in this Popular Nostalgia website, I mean it was Saturday morning gold when I were a wee laddie. BBC One mornings, before your mums and dads got out of bed were made all the more enjoyable/tolerable by The Raccons while we waited for Going Live to [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

The Thompson Twins released this classic anti-drugs rant in 1985, but aside from its important message to the kids, it is a classic tune, with the most instantly catchy and incredible base-line – ooh ooh ooh ooh ow ooh ooh ooh ow. He’s not one for sympathy though, old Doctor Dream, so don’t mess with [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Was it 1995? Or was it 1996? I really can’t remember. Who gives a Jacob’s cracker anyhow, if a Scatman can do it, so can you. Where’s the Scatman? Scatman John surprisingly didn’t seem to want to hang around for long. If memory serves, he only released one other (popular) single – and it was [...]

What can I possibly say about the lyrical genious that is Eiffel 65 Blue. Not much. Just listen to it, enjoy the video, and remember what you were doing during the latter half of the 1990s! I’m blue too!

I watched “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” for the first time last night. Everything about it is so Eighties – the discontentment with the rat race, the power-suiting secretary, the smoking indoors and the Range Rover in the middle of London. Richard E. Grant plays the madman very well indeed and that boil is [...]

Some people chew it, some people smoke it, but no-one seems to sniff tobacco anymore. In our local pub (very oldy worldy CAMRA type), there’s a rack by the door filled with little metal pots. They have funny flavours written in old school lettering on the lids. This is snuff and you won’t find many [...]