Sunday, February 2, 2014

Billy Ocean!

Sorry for the recent slowdown due to work... Let's get back to this gently with a guy who had a lot of success in 1984: Billy Ocean. He was already at the top of the charts by the time I arrived in France, with this song:



Apprently he had a version of the above song also called "European Queen", but I don't think I ever heard that version back then, even though I suppose it was targeted at precisely the European market:



Kinda weird, huh? I think "Carribean Queen" just rolls off the tongue better and makes more sense in the context of the song. A "European Queen" makes me think of Elizabeth II, not exactly someone I'd lust after...

Anyway... "Carribean Queen" is an example of a song that I first found out about by reading the charts, not by hearing it on the radio. I made it a mission to pay special attention to any mention of him or this song if it ever got played on the radio. But what happened is that Billy Ocean came up with a new single from his album, and so I heard the following song before I heard Carribean Queen:




I bet you that you'd forgotten all about "Loverboy", huh? I think the whole point of this blog is give you these Blast from the Past moments, things that are still in the remotest recesses of your memory, but not entirely gone... For whatever reason I remember being quite impressed by the production quality of the song AND the video (which reminds me a bit of Dune, a big movie flop from 1984, but that's for another post...). I think they were trying to outdo the success of Carribean Queen, but it wasn't to be...


4 comments:

  1. I do actually remember loverboy, but of course Carribean queen was his main hit, speaking of billy ocean he had bunch of other hits in the following years (going gets tough, tough get going), (there will be sad songs) and of course (get out of my dreams and get into my car) from the two coreys movie (license to drive that featured a young heather graham

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  2. are you sure Dune was a flop? I was under the impression that it was one of the biggest movies of the year?

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  3. Hi there! I had absolutely forgotten about this song. Thanks Dr Easy.
    I don't know what the Dune topic is related to, but from what I remember, it was greatly promoted but the movie was crap. But I hadn't seen it in those days, so my opinion probably doesn't count much.
    Cheers.

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  4. Hey, Elvis is in the building! :) The special effects of the "Loverboy" video reminded me somehow of Dune, I admit it's a narrow connection... Your impressions are the same as mine: there was heavy promotion for the movie, but at least in the eyes of the kid that I was it was crap indeed. You know it's bad when you're rooting for the bad guys: Sting played one of them, and he had a glorious punk haircut in that movie, while Kyle MacLachlan who played the good guy just looked too "pretty" and clean cut to be likable. Fans of the book weren't impressed either, based on discussions I had years later with Frank Herbert readers...

    Many years later I saw bits of the movie again on TV, and I could finally see what Lynch was going for: he'd tried to make the Dune world his. I might have enjoyed the movie as a Lynch fan. But I think the initial project with Moebius and Jodorowski would have been a better fit for this project.

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