Sunday 5 March 2017

Do I lie like a lounge-room lizard, or do I sing like a bird released?



Timeslip moment again...

We're hurtling at warp drive into this week in 1992, folks - HM The Queen's annus horribilis; the year of Balkan Wars and French truck driver blockades, of Hurricane Andrew and the Clintons, of the Barcelona Olympics and El Dorado; when the first nicotine patches, the first smartphone/touch-screen PDA and the ill-fated CD-i player were all launched, and TWA went bust.

In the news this week twenty-five years ago [where does the time go?]: Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence (triggering years of bloodshed across the former Yugoslavia); PM John Major announced a general election was to be held on 9th April; the People's Republic of China ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and in the ascendant were Microsoft (with the release of the soon-to-be-predominant Windows 3.1), Douglas Adams (who released Mostly Harmless, the fifth (and final) book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series) and Britain's polytechnics (which under the Further and Higher Education Act could now become universities), but 263 people were killed in a mining disaster in Turkey. In our cinemas: The Prince of Tides, Betty Blue and The Last Boy Scout. On telly: Men Behaving Badly, Thomas the Tank Engine and The Camomile Lawn.

And what of the charts in March 1992? At #1 was one of our house faves Shakespear's Sister with Stay, closely followed by (believe it or not) The Temptations with their classic My Girl [which was re-released as the title number of the film of the same name], Shanice, Guns'n'Roses, Opus III, Madness, The Pasadenas, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson and the KLF. But waiting in the wings just outside the Top Ten was Aussie band Crowded House and this uplifting classic:


Walking 'round the room singing 'Stormy Weather'
At Fifty Seven Mount Pleasant Street
Well it's the same room, but everything's different
You can fight the sleep, but not the dream

Things ain't cookin' in my kitchen
Strange affliction wash over me
Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire
Couldn't conquer the blue sky

Well, there's a small boat made of china
It's going nowhere on the mantelpiece
Well, do I lie like a lounge-room lizard
Or do I sing like a bird released?

Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you
Everywhere you go, always take the weather
Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you
Everywhere you go, always take the weather, the weather with you


Unfortunately if anyone wanted to "take the weather with them" today, it would be blustery heavy showers...

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