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Mondeo Pop European Holiday
It always made little sense how mid-00s internet music pundits would cry a fie upon the British top 40 for not housing random Balkan dancehall producers or Icelandic countrypop divas, because the 90s had shown that The Official UK Chart Company was unlikely to be troubled by any songs that had a legitimately chart-conquering feel, but happened to hail from foreign climes, let alone by bedroom producers from Caracas. So ILB is proud to present to you a brief tribute to two classic Mondeo Pop joints from that time period that ne’er crossed-over. Read more…
Mondeo Pop Month: Lightning Seeds – Pure
Mondeo Pop Month: The Dream Academy – Life In A Northern Town
Mondeo Pop Month: Tanita Tikaram – Good Tradition
Mondeo Pop Month: Hue and Cry – Labour of Love
Mondeo Pop Month: Robert Palmer – She Makes My Day
Mondeo Pop Month: Level 42 – Lessons In Love
Mondeo Pop Month: Fine Young Cannibals – Johnny Come Home
Mondeo Pop Month: Del Amitri – Roll to Me
Mondeo Pop Month: The Korgis – Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime
Released: May 1980
UK chart position: #5
From the album: Dumb Waiters
I only found out a few weeks back that “I’m Free”, The Soup Dragons’ mid-1990-defining slice of baggy mediocrity, was actually a cover of a Rolling Stones song. This may be a common blindspot for anyone who was between the ages of, say, five and 12 in 1990, where “love me, hold me, love me, hold me…” doesn’t signify a wild and shirtless young Jagger, but rather four Mary Whitehouse Experience lookin’ boys with curtain fringes lipsynching on Going Live.
And maybe the same generation had, for a while, the same problem with “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometimes”. Maybe it’s just me, maybe the time I slowly became aware of music from before my generation (say, 1997), this song’s 2:33pm playings on local radio were accompanied by “Wait, I don’t remember the chick from Baby D having that deep a voice” solely as a result of my ignorance and weren’t indicative of any greater concerns. Who knows?
What’s always struck me about this song is how polite it is. “Got To” rather than” Gotta”, for a song that was released when punk and new wave were perfectly acceptable chart concerns, always seemed to be the sign of a band who really wanted to mark themselves out as mature.
We’ve gone over the need for maturity and a rejection of the values of youth in Mondeo Pop before, but it may be worth reiterating with regards to The Korgis: the frontman and guitarist of whom were both formerly members of Stackridge, a band who peddled that most maligned of adult genres: prog. It’s not too hard to imagine that, when they split Stackridge in 1977, bloodied and battered from the assaults of punk and disco, they decided to pay the mortgage off with something that would have no real appeal to the flared and bondage trousered massifs. The Korgis even come from a time before you could wear jeans with a shirt to work.
It’s hard to imagine a greater lowbeat track than this though, mournful and dour and with very little hope. And if you want very little hope, you can always try and hunt down covers of this song by the following artists: Beck, Zucchero, Ginger from The Wildhearts, Glasvegas. What a gang.
