Look what you can turn up in the most unlikely of places. We were in Basildon on Saturday, and in a similar twist of old rare music fate to when I last found other hard to find Stock Aitken Waterman records, I stumbled across this video from 1987 on a town centre market stall which also sold, of all things, badges, model cars and Nazi memorabilia.
Completing the Hit Factory trilogy (I already have the second and third volumes in the series), it’s such an early release, it doesn’t include any Kylie or Jason, relying on Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up and Bananarama’s I Heard A Rumour (below) to lure me in. Other early SAW ‘videostars’ include Princess and Edwin Starr, as well as Phil Fearon and The Three Degrees.
And yes, just as you’d expect, it’s laughably cheesy, with one cheap video following another. Most, like Mandy Smith, seem to follow a studio-based template whereby the artist stands in front of a cloth backdrop ‘dancing’ to their track in some now-hideous outfit. Princess clearly got the pick of the deal; she got outside locations around London for Say I’m Your Number One. Mel and Kim didn’t even bother to turn up for FLM, though, relying on puppets for their appearance cut in with some concert footage.
Classic. Well worth £1.50.
Basildon is clearly the place for bargains, as well as the home town of Alison Moyet, Yazoo and Depeche Mode. It also has a giant QD store, and in the spirit of reminiscing we went in, as there used to be similar shops in East Anglia and certainly in Lowestoft and Norwich. A ‘quick look’ turned into a £45 spree, and included such hauls as a new pair of jeans and also a coat, all for a price less than the cost of a designer item of either.
I also had my first seasonal coffee (a gingerbread latte) of the year, sitting in the Costa in the town centre. And, although there were no falling mattresses from tower blocks this time – unlike our visit – and the skies were still grey – like our last visit – the place had a certain charm. That charm must have been genuine, too, as a planned ‘couple of hours’ visit turned into an all-day stay.
