Old Enough to Forget

Cutting Crew were one of those bands whose career trajectory followed Newton's third law - one that has been corrupted and over simplified to: what goes up, must come down. It's not like I'm singling Cutting Crew out for a sophomoric drubbing with cheap innuendo.  The band was in good company for all that. Heck a couple of years earlier Mr. Mister's Welcome to the Real World (1985) had a couple of absolutely huge radio singles. After all that "success" that band just disappeared. Now the difference between Mr. Mister and Cutting Crew for me is that I had the Mr. Mister album. All I knew of Cutting Crew was the big single, and it was big: "(I Just) Died in Your Arms" and to a lesser extent (because I'd forgotten about it until I listened to the record) the obligatory power ballad (not a lot of power, but a lot of ballad) "I've Been in Love Before" which was pretty good. Who knows why I didn't get the album back in the day, I mea...

"Last Song" is really the only tune I can name off the top of my head by Edward Bear. It's one of those little AM radio nuggets that still holds up. When I found the album I was in one of those moods where I wanted to take a chance on something, and this one looked interesting, and the bear on the cover looked slightly menacing. This pressing had the hype sticker embossed onto the cover, "includes LAST SONG, FLY ACROSS THE SEA, MASQUERADE" of the three songs I was only familiar with the aforementioned "Last Song" so I was curious to hear them. But first, some trivia. Who doesn't love trivia? Hands up? The band is literally named after Winnie the Pooh. I was this many years old when I learned that Edward Bear and Winnie-the-Pooh are one and the same. Nifty. It makes the ominous looking pissed off bear on the cover that much cooler. Now back to the previously meandering entry. The album opens with "Last Song" and the song is pure pop cheese...

A few months back my buddy Olav, who has a surprisingly deep knowledge of classic rock and an ability to remember weird details that tend to escape us mere mortals sent me a note asking if I'd heard the song "Soviet Jewellery" to which I replied ... "Huh?" So he sent me a link, and I told him it was a pretty cool song, and that as far as I was concerned, was that. Except that it wasn't. Without going into a lot of extra pointless verbiage Olav and I were in a record store and I was rooting around the cheap bins. Rather than stand around Olav decided he'd look too, and in short order he emerged with a copy of BB Gabor . "Oooh," I said, "that's cool, put it on the pile." Yeah, it was a fruitful day and there was a pile ... except this one never made it to the pile. "I'm getting this one." said my rather impish friend. As our visit went on he found a couple more things that ended up on my pile, and when we'd paid an...