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Hope you’re having a lovely weekend and enjoying the sunshine – nice out isn’t it?

Just realised that the Fiction page wasn’t working properly so went to go and get it sorted (’tis done!), only to click on one of the links there to a Doctor Who short story I wrote for the Eighth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith called “Lost and Found“.

The prose needs a bit of tidying up here and there, but I’m actually struck by what a nice little piece it is. It’s not, even if I do say so myself, too bad at all.

But yes, I recently had the fortune to stumble upon “Story of My Life” which, it turns out, was the B-side to “Rhythm of the Rain” back in 1991.

“Rain” of course was a slighty pointless cover (nice vocal, nice arrangement etc, just brought nothing new to the track) but its B-side is something else entirely. It’s even featured in TV Cream’s Top 100 B-Sides, amazingly beating the Human League’s “Non Stop” and Yazoo’s “Winter Kills” in the rankings.

I’ve never been a winner, I’m a champion loser,
Good at getting things wrong.
I’m the guy, when it gets romantic, forgets the words to the song.

The best pop songs are miserable of course. This is an Undisputable Fact (TM) against which I will Brook No Argument (TM). And Story of My Life is particularly sombre and self-pitying. It’s a morose slab of “my life just pretty much sucks – you’d have to be insane to go out with me” which suggests that someone really needs to slap him and tell him to pull his act together.

And by the way, if you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re looking for sunshine I ain’t the luckiest one.
If you come with me, there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d be cloud in the desert
Or a total eclipse of the sun.

But misery is not all you need. It’s better yet if the words are disguised within a catchy upbeat little number. “I Should Be So Lucky” for example, for all its catchy, irritating bounce is a wrist-slittingly melancholic tale of unrequited lust. “Story of My Life” is dressed up in some of the least PWL-like production I’ve heard.

Opening with a wailing guitar and underpinned with some determinedly “Madchester” beats, pianos and horns you’d hardly recognise it as a Stock Aitken Waterman song. It’s more typically baggy 90s than PWL ever managed before.

Baby, I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m so clever at coming in second – In fact, I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m second to none.
If they had a chart for the broken-hearted you know I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d be number one.

The chorus is, to be fair, slender. It’s just a repetition of the words “and that’s the story of my life”. Add in a couple of “woahs” and go up at the end on the repeat and you’re done. Not so much a chorus as a chant – Phil Oakey would be proud. Still, if that makes you feel a bit short-changed you also get a middle eight and a heroic axe solo courtsey of Matt Aitken.

It’s madness, madness I tell you. It sounds at once utterly unlike any other S/A/W track and you get the feeling they should have done more odd fusion styles (if only for their own amusement).

Even better as far as I’m concerned… there’s an extended mix too! It’s only on a dutch CD pressing and it isn’t even on the tracklist but there it is in my CD player now.

I’m in retro-heaven.

Why the change? Well, the old site was all very nice, and I had a lot of stuff in the old blog, but somehow I wanted something integrated and funky and Content Management Systemy of my own, so here it is. I hope my old blog readers find their way here and make themselves at home and that it’s all relatively easy to work your way around.

There’ll be a bit of fine-tuning over the next month or so I’m sure, but for now I’m bored with working on it so here it is.

Welcome!

(And trust me to choose an A1 song to paraphrase for the title, eh?)