Earlier this year, their single Whole Again topped the charts for four weeks: it is one of the biggest-selling records of the year. Five years later, McCluskey and Kershaw are the songwriting team behind Atomic Kitten, currently one of the biggest teen bands in the country. They would oversee the formation of a teen band to perform their songs. McCluskey and his writing partner Stuart Kershaw came up with a solution to their ongoing credibility problem. I just thought: 'Screw this, I'm not going to bang my head against a brick wall.' I was conceited enough to believe that I could still write hits - I just needed someone else to sing them, because I had had my time." The upshot of it was that one of the best songs I'd ever written struggled to get to number 17 in the charts. Because Radio 1 wouldn't play it, Woolworths wouldn't stock it. Radio 1 wouldn't play it, because it wasn't perceived as trendy by their target audience. I sweated blood over a single released in 1996 called Walking on the Milky Way, which I thought was about as good a song as I could write. "To be seen as an 80s synth band in the mid-90s was quite a dilemma for me. "As with every good musical decade, what was fashionable in the 90s was a complete rejection of the previous decade's style," says McCluskey. And, by the 90s, they were hopelessly out of time. They wrote perky, bleeping pop songs about nuclear war. It's difficult to imagine a more 80s band. For almost 20 years, he was the vocalist in Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. If events had taken a different turn, Andy McCluskey could quite easily have been part of the Hear and Now tour. It is the reduced-to-clear bin of pop, filled with artists past their sell-by date. It's an honest living, but there's still something faintly depressing about the whole concept of the nostalgia tour. Curiosity Killed the Cat, Go West, Heaven 17, Paul Young, even T'Pau - all are still dutifully treading the boards, belting out their hits for thirtysomethings keen to relive their youth. The Hear and Now tour offered a selection of artists huge when Margaret Thatcher stalked the land and mobile phones were still the size of house-bricks, but whose careers stalled in the harsh light of the 90s. Last week, the latest 80s revival show rolled into Wembley Arena.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |