Unchained?

"And time... goes by... so slowly..."

YEAH RIGHT!

Who wrote that track anyway? I remember getting a copy on vinyl as a ?16th birthday prezzie (along with another record... think it may have been Crowded House, not sure...) - ah, vinyl. A gent of my acquaintance says that his daughter asks him 'what are these black CDs you've got?'!.

Hmm, time for some internet searching I think. Is there a music equivalent to imdb?

*after a bit* I thought I'd found it - Gracenote, but it doesn't seem to list release dates of singles etc, more a track listing service. *dives back into Google*

*later* nor is it Online Music Database. Where am I going wrong? Do I need to find some obsessive Righteous brothers fan's fansite with exhaustive discography?

*later again* I've found All music (ok, so it was the first result on google but how often is the first result the one you want? Or is my usage of search terms not very good?) Evidently the single was (re)released 90/91 although it did seem to be a mainly US site but 91 would tie in with my 16th birthday (an exciting affair with non-alcoholic wine. How cool I thought it. History doesn't record my friends' opinions of the party or the wine but at least I mustered a few people to come...) Now I need to find a list of other chart hits for that period. In the meantime, it turns out that Alex North and Hy Zaret composed, Phil Spector was the guy behind this and most of their other successful songs, and there were so many other people who performed this track that the site kept giving me an error (at least I assume that's why I got an error. Probably something more mundane.)

The trouble is that although this site has a good search facility (as far as I can tell) it will give you US hits not UK ones and I've a feeling that this other single was from a UK band, who may not have been known in the US. Aha, the title has just come to me - "I need a little time" - I think that's the one anyway. OK so they may be Irish rather than UK but I had the right side of the Atlantic... some more searching needed to jog a late-night memory.

*back*
Of course, the Beautiful South! How could I forget... and I was right, they are British. (Readers may be amazed at my lack of knowledge of fairly basic music info, but I can't keep everything in my head at once, you know - and there's a lot about tiling just now, soon to be displaced by theology and New testament Greek, again. I rarely score highly on PopMaster and don't usually bother to count, but I did once get 18 points!) So my blathering about this site not showing UK hits/bands was way off target. It does seem to suggest a 1990 rather than 1991 release, so perhaps it was my 15th birthday...

Of course, these weren't my first singles. Not by a long shot. Well, a long shot if you're using a very short ruler. My first ever single (another gift, I think), bizarrely, was Adam Ant (or was it still Adam and the Ants?) with Plastic Surgery/Deutscher Girls. Memory fails to establish if this was a double-A or which was A and which B but I'm not doing much more music searching just now.

Anyone who reads this, let me know your first single (and indeed your recommended music search site - there must be one that is as good for music as imdb for movies - or else let me know if there's a better site than imdb for movies).

However, the first single I bought was Take On Me by A-ha, and some night when I'm feeling more like embarrassing myself (or embarrassing myself even more) I'll relate a tale of me, a primary school disco and unreturned love (or at least attraction...)

The point of referencing those lyrics at the start of this posting was to say, actually time has gone quite fast since my last posting, I'm blaming it on the boy and on my work, tiling a bathroom. A slightly more experienced friend/tiler came and basically said 'it's a big job - I'd have thought twice before taking it on'... which was a bit of a downer! However he more than offset that by coming to help me with some tricky bits of tiling and even lending me his tile saw!

I think I'll sign off here, I need some sleep before doing more sawing tomorrow and also want to check on my sleeping family.

Toodle-pip!