Compilation Album Review: "Let's Do It 2"

This is it, readers. I've posted several of these retro compilation reviews, but this is a special one – I actually owned it when it came out. Well, technically my family owned it. My sister and I asked my mum to buy it for us on cassette back in 1990. I wanted it for the tracks by Aerosmith and Technotronic, and my sister wanted it for...I can't remember. Anyway, I searched high and low looking for that cassette, to no avail. But I was lucky enough to get this CD copy in pretty much mint condition for only a dollar on eBay! Enough talk: let's do it (2).

Compilation: Let's Do It 2
Released: 1990 – WEA
Number of tracks: 16
Number one singles: 2 – "Love Shack" by The B-52s, "Janie's Got A Gun" by Aerosmith
Other top ten singles: 10
Best track: "Janie's Got A Gun" by Aerosmith
Hidden gem: There are no songs here I hadn't heard before.

The Black Box album Dreamland didn't use "Ride On Time" as its opening track, which is a bit of a shame. Thankfully, Let's Do It 2 does. Such an iconic song definitely demands – and gets – attention when it kicks off a collection of songs. It didn't get to number 1, but it bloody well should have.

The song that follows it is the only low point of this compilation: The B-52s execrable number 1 hit, the first of the decade – "Love Shack". I could tolerate it then, but now I can't stand to listen to more than five seconds of that junky piss-poor excuse for a song. If I never hear that dreck ever again it will be too soon.

Right, that's the negativity over with! It's all good from here on in. You might be fed up of songs like Kaoma's "Lambada" and Lisa Stansfield's twee and nebbishy "All Around The World" (the next two songs that follow), but I don't mind them in small doses. Milli Vanilli and Bad English follow, and although I'm not a fan of those songs, they (and most of the other 16 songs on here) hold a special place in my heart because they were the ones occupying the top 50 when I started following the charts on a weekly basis).

"Janie's Got A Gun" is one of my favourite songs of all time and I still love it now. Pump was the first album I ever got, and I've got some other Aerosmith albums since and it's still my favourite song by them. Just a brilliant, haunting song. After Motely Crue (the Motley Crue tribute act who prefer budget accommodation) and Martika, comes the seminal house track "Pump Up The Jam" by Technotronic, my fave song after Aerosmith in those early days. The inclusion of these two songs alone makes it worth the price. Hey, didn't I just say that's why I asked my mum to buy it all those years ago?

Things then go into a lull with Alannah Myles, Phil Collins, Linda Ronstadt & Aaron Neville and Michael Bolton, before it picks up towards the end with accordion-featuring "The Love We Make" by Girl Overboard, which was the only song I hadn't heard when I listened to the cassette. I think it'd finished its chart run by thew time I started watching Rage. The final track is "Just Like Jesse James" by Cher, a song I didn't mind – I definitely preferred it to her previous single "If I Could Turn Back Time" (and probably so did she, from what I've read).

This is how you put a compilation together. Just about every song here did well on the charts, and 10 of the 16 songs here made the year-end Top 30 for 1990. The average chart position of these 16 songs is between numbers 7 and 8 (it works out to be 7.5), and includes two number 1s, four number 2s, two number 3s and two number 4s. Was this a lucky coincidence? Or was early 1990 just a great time for pop music? I'd like to think the latter.

Rating: 9/10

 

2020 UPDATE: On July 5, 2020 at an antiques and collectibles market in Bendigo, Victoria (that was so good I visited it twice), I found Let's Do It 2 on vinyl. I didn't get it, because I already own it on CD, so I took the above photos for posterity. You can see that the record only has 14 tracks – the Motley Crue and Cher songs were dropped. The lineup remains solid.

Compilation Album Review: "Hits Of 1990 Volume 2"

Compilation: Hits Of 1990 Volume 2
Released: 1990 – EMI
Number of tracks: 18
Number one singles: 1 — "Opposites Attract" by Paula Abdul
Other top ten singles: 5
Best track: "Opposites Attract" by Paula Abdul
Hidden gem: "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Megadeth (!)

1990. You remember it. Well if you don't, that's too bad. You missed a killer year in music, and you ought to hang your head in shame. Do it now. Don't worry. I'll wait.

You missed Paula Abdul singing with an animated cat! I know, animation is everywhere now. You can probably produce something to Toy Story standards with a mobile phone app these days. But trust me, in 1990, this was something to behold. It takes serious ca$h to produce an animated pop promo. A-ha had done it, so had Peter Gabriel, now Paula Abdul was doing it. Result? A massive number 1 single.

You also missed some classic house. "Italo House Mix" by Rococo, "Numero Uno" by Starlight, "I Thank You" by Adeva – that last one wasn't big with me but ya get my drift – which are all here. And you missed "Dangerous" by Roxette which should've got more attention than those sappy ballads of theirs. And also "Sweet Surrender" by Wet Wet Wet. Okay, so it wasn't all good.

But most of all, you missed one of the best novelty songs of all time: "Check Out The Chicken" by Grandmaster Chicken and D.J. Duck. A song which came from The Netherlands, no less! I'd never have guessed that. And it had an animated video as well. Genius. You miss this, you're doing yourself a disservice.

Rating: 6/10

Stationery: Pens And Pencils

If you're familiar with my previous posts on this blog, or you know I'm an illustrator/comics artist, this won't come as a surprise, but – I love stationery! And it's not because of the graphic design and other arty stuff I do to occupy my time. My love of stationery goes right back to childhood. When my family emigrated to Australia in 1987, during our stop at Singapore Airport my mum asked my sister and I to choose a small treat from one of the gift shops there. My sister chose a pocket-sized book about the Pink Panther – a book being a useful thing to have on a long flight – but I made the slightly less practical choice of a dark green Stabilo Boss highlighter (the type pictured here).

Even before that I enjoyed drawing with broad-tipped marker pens, even whiteboard markers. And from that came a lifelong appreciation of stationery. I love it all: from the humble pencil and its various grades, to ball-point pens and fountain pens, to coloured markers, brushes, paints, rulers, stencils, and various weights of paper. Not to mention the lesser-used items such as hole punchers, pencil sharpeners, staplers and drawing pins.

I produce most of my work using a computer. In a digital-obsessed world, I think it's important to swing back to those often-overlooked and ubiquitous items that are found on many an office or artists' desk. You can't beat the tactile feel of pens, paper, and other necessities. It is these items I'm posting about here – notable examples from my personal collection. First up: pens and pencils.

On the left here are five interesting pens (well, interesting to me, anyway). At the top is one of those novelty pens that lights up with a blue light. I call it a spy pen, and it was given to me in 2015. I also had one a decade earlier. There's a yellow Sheaffer fountain pen I use fairly regularly with a chunky barrel. Below that is a pale blue Paper Mate 'Tandem', a ballpoint/mechanical pencil combo that first came out in the late '80s. I was given this one in 1989 in primary school, and I still use the pencil. Then come a couple more novelty pens: one from my dad's old workplace in Overseal, England and the other from Britannia airlines – it was bought for me on board a flight to Spain in 1987. So that green highlighter wasn't my first plane-related pen purchase after all.


Next is half a set (my sister got the other half) of Berol Notewriter fine-point markers which were given to me in 1997. If you look closely at the bottom of the box they came in, you can see they were manufactured in December 1982. They still worked when I got them, and they still work now after 25 years (although I haven't used them constantly, of course). All the teachers at my first school in England used these. Berol supplied to the Queen – not hard to see why.

Can you read Japanese on that brown pen? It says Penteru hagaki fude pen (tsuin). It is made by the top Japanese pen company Pentel, and hagaki means postcard, so I'm guessing that's what most Japanese people would use it for – new year's greeting cards and the like. Fude means brush, so it's a brush pen to help you write in that authentic brushstroke style, and tsuin is just the English word twin: it has a much finer (and non-brushy) point on the other end. I don't know if these were sold outside Japan, but I got this one when I was there, in 2001. (I used it to write a thankyou card to one of the teachers at my school for lending me her bike, which went down well!) The three pencils are just reliable ones I use, in particular the blue Staedtler 4H Mars Lumograph, most excellent for my comic pencilling, and I haven't needed to sharpen it in over 15 years. The purple one is a 2H Mitsubishi pencil. And you thought they only made cars, huh.

Next time: more stationery. Paint and brushes, to be precise.

Eurovision Results Map 2017

Another Eurovision Song Contest done, and for the fourth time, here is my Eurovision stats map.

There were three countries that improved their previous best results this year. Bulgaria placed second and Moldova third (Moldova's song "Hey, Mamma!" was my personal favourite). And Portugal! They won for the first time in 49 attempts! Well done, Portugal. I always like it when a country wins that has never won before. This is the 20th Eurovision I have watched to date, and I have seen a country win for the first time on ten occasions: Estonia in 2001, Latvia in 2002, Turkey in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Greece in 2005, Finland in 2006, Serbia in 2007, Russia in 2008, Azerbaijan in 2011 and now Portugal.

Highlights of the contest: Moldova's so called "epic sax guy"; Salvador Sobral performing the winning song at the end with his sister Luisa, who'd written it; and Katrina Leskanich (the UK jury spokesperson) telling the hosts that she won Eurovision for the UK in 1997, to which host Volodymyr Ostapchuk told his co-host Oleksandr Skichko that 1997 was the year he (Oleksandr) was born (actually it isn't, he was born in 1991. Phew! I felt really old for a moment there).

And the winning song was performed in the country's native language, for the first time since 2007!

About time, I say.

Lowlights: Israel's possible withdrawal from the Contest permanently; and that moronic prat who bared his spotty backside on stage during the voting performance by Jamala while wearing an Australian flag.

Brunswick

Following on from yesterday's post about the Homecooked Comics Mini-Mart, I thought I'd post a selection of photos from the streets (Sydney Rd and Victoria St, to be precise) of Brunswick. I've lived in Melbourne for 12 years now, and this was the first time I had been to Brunswick. So, what did we find?

Well, firstly and quite surprisingly, the suburb of Brunswick has a 'sister city' relationship with the Greek city of Sparta, and one of Brunswick's streets bears its name. The ancient Spartan king Leonidas is commemorated in statue here. I had to slightly move the floral wreath someone had placed, so I could get the plaque in shot.

Two views of a hand-painted signal box on the street corner – a bit of street art done by primary school kids. You can make out the name 'St. Joseph's' and the initials of what I assume are the contributors.

I like photographing old, faded hand-painted signage, and this 'Nestlé's Chocolate' above a shop is a fine example.

Near the Blyth St intersection, a shop called 'Mary Eats Cake'. I'm sure she does. 

A closeup of a shop front's decorative tiles, and what look like two bullet holes. I'm sure they're not though.

Putting stickers on things is much more preferable to graffiti, kids.

This was in a shop window. Interesting.

More of the same tiles further down the road. Perhaps these shop fronts were all tiled at the same time. 'NO POSTERS' warns a handwritten sticker. Better do as it says.

Last of all, a nice lighting display in a shop selling...I forget now. Perhaps Middle Eastern craft items.

One more thing about Brunswick: for some reason it was the suburb whose name was chosen to be the largest on the fabric design that now graces some of Melbourne's train seats. Why? Us mere mortals shall never know.