The Traveling Wilburys Collection was waiting for me on my return from the world tour, a gift a propos of nothing from my mum.  It was as if she was foisting her tastes on me, interested in gauging my reaction to a record she liked.  Perhaps she would then exploit my thoughts to relaunch a legendary blog.  Bit far-fetched, yeah.
 
My parents never made a big show of the music they liked, but I know I’ve been influenced: maybe not by the military brass bands my dad champions – although there’s nothing wrong with a bit of parade ground pomp – but certainly by the compact selection of seven inch singles my mother brought to the marriage.  It wasn’t an obvious pile of canonical smash hits.  The Beatles’ haul amounted to the ‘Twist And Shout’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ EPs (as well as Help! on LP) and the only other big standards I can recall were Elvis’ ‘Wooden Heart’ and Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, but it was an eclectic heap.  I ended up steeped in Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen, Shadows EPs and Greek oddities on dappled vinyl, which possibly explains a few mysteries.
 
Help! was the only LP I knew, the template for all albums as far as I cared.  My older sister crossed out my mum’s maiden name on the back of the sleeve and substituted her own, but it was always mine.  Still is.  I didn’t like the photo of Ringo, Paul reminded me of my dad, and John… well, I didn’t really connect.  George was cool and wore a cowboy hat.
 
The hat’s still firmly in place on ‘Handle With Care’ which is George Harrison’s song, challenged only by the Big O’s angelic interruptions.  Dylan, Petty and Lynne play bit parts, as they were always going to, despite Bob’s extraordinary celebrity – he’d blown it by the 90s, of course, before sucking it up again.  I always liked this tune, almost enough to buy it, but I wasn’t terrifically drawn to all the huge Q magazine favourites in the infancy of the CD.  Teenagers were priced out in money and weight of history.
 
Junior has grown up at breakneck pace these last few weeks, stretching her dancing repertoire and generally refining the way she moves her limbs.  ‘Handle With Care’ gets a more sophisticated reaction than we’re used to, enjoying an array of turns and wiggles and shuffles and shakes of the head.  She also brandished a maraca which added a funky polish to the song that the decrepit country rockers weren’t quite able to provide themselves.  What they provided was less than the sum of its parts, but charming against the odds.

We came home from an impromptu late lunch at the local pizzeria on Sunday afternoon – oddly, it reminded me of The Tiger Who Came To Tea when there’s no food left in the house because the tiger has hoovered the lot and the dad suggests they all go out for tea at a café.  That was impossibly glamorous to me as a boy.  I suppose we never went out in the evenings.  Now I think I’m a glam dad.
 
I’ve lost the thread.  Right, yes, we came home and Junior’s mum went to the working end of the house to do all that cleaning nonsense while Junior and I settled in front of the TV.  That’s Entertainment was on – you know, the Hollywood musicals compilation – and, after a quick warble from Mario Lanza, Donald O’Connor popped up with this turn from Singin’ In The Rain.  It’s a tour de force of slapstick and acrobatics set to a headlong showtune, and Junior was bowled over.  Hitting his head on planks, pushing and pulling funny faces, wrestling with a mannequin and walking on the ceiling (well, I was duped as a child, anyway), O’Connor delighted with every move – all this, and he was singing a catchy number too.  Junior has worked out Sky+ and, while I still think it’s something approaching voodoo, she sees rewinding TV as commonplace.
 
We watched ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ seven times on the trot.

There’s a sense of time running out for Stefani, who embarked on an ultra-glam pure-pop career when she was comfortably on the wrong side of 30.  Still, Madonna had already done the groundwork, so Gwen didn’t really need to dirty her hands in her 20s – she could please herself making hopelessly wan ska records instead with her lumpen No Doubt cohorts.  That history makes some of the batty solo efforts way more palatable – I mean, which platinum lycra wearer would you rather have?  The one fronting a bad Bad Manners, or the one yodelling over a hip-hop stutter?
 
Yes.  Tough call.
 
‘The Sweet Escape’ wasn’t played today – it’s a bonus entry, a gap-filler in disguise – but I have reams of material if you want to know Junior’s thoughts.  This dizzily candysweet hook-up with Akon (they call him Akon Drum) is a top drawer pop moment with Junior.  I mean, it goes “OOOOO-OOOOO, WEEEEE-EEEEE” – how can a kid resist?  The very second the crystal guitar strum announces the tune, Junior is “OOOOO-OOOOO, WEEEEE-EEEEE”-ing fit to face down anyone who wants an “OOOOO-OOOOO, WEEEEE-EEEEE” fight.  Every single time.  Blame her mum.  I do.
 
 
That’s quite enough free-form stuff; I feel ready to do another year.  Tapes/minidiscs/mp3 folders remain for, I think, 1985, 1986, 1994, 1998 and 2004 – so any hardy readers can vote for one of them or maybe suggest something completely different and we’ll see how keen I am.  Good.

I’m not alone in thinking 1985 an awful year for music, but we have to cross our fingers that there were at least 20 singles poking their vinyl heads out of the slurry.  The mighty Microdisney were hitting their stride, turning out withering satire in candyfloss clothes and worrying the chart scorers not one jot.  They were one of Rough Trade’s proudest signings, no doubt, but not quite Smithsian money-spinners, and nor was Cathal Coughlan a Morrisseyan copy-filler – instead they were critics’ darlings and the edgy band in a 13-year-old’s cassette rack.
 
‘Birthday Girl’ comes from The Clock Comes Down The Stairs LP, with its cover photo taken from Clapham Junction.  It’s a powerful album – literally.  The cassette wouldn’t play this morning, with Junior all primed for indie swaying, so I tried to eject it.  That wouldn’t work, so I prised the tape deck open to find that the cassette had burst in two and irreparably broken the player.  The cassette itself could be patched up quite happily and put in Junior’s ghetto blaster while I changed her nappy.
 
So, yes, ‘Birthday Girl’.  WHAT a coincidence.  Junior is two today – and, for the first time in four months, not fibbing when she’s asked her age.  Microdisney’s churning pop-tinged rhythm ‘n’ blues had her rocking her new toy baby on the changing table and asking for a repeat when it faded.  The lyrics are a little more caustic than some tribute to a girl’s big day – they’re more about Coughlan’s standard spitting rage at being thrust into such a useless world, as the “birthday boy” – but hey, let’s enjoy the superficial.

Pop will forgive anything these days.  It’s a second chance saloon allowing any crowd of opportunists to get back together for another shot at the big time, and the big time gets shot.  Now snowballing out of control, with barely a band of the last 30 years unreformed, any act split asunder by any reason is willing to bury the hatchet and chase the touring dollar – and the media, and hence the public, lap it up.  It’s tough to think of a reunion that’s been artistically worthwhile, but it’s tougher to think of a band still resolutely broken up.
 
A few years back, when the “dumper” beckoned you fell into its deathly embrace.  In the 80s, huge acts like Culture Club, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, The Human League and A-ha felt the dread hand of fate and never really recovered – the creative muse blown, the public appeal rotten.  But there were new bands, new sounds, new movements.  Now we stagnate, riddled with nostalgia.  These charts probably don’t help.
 
So, what about ABC?  They were a band that wouldn’t die – in one sense bucking the trend, in another just refusing to accept it.  Within a couple of years of their zeitgeist-defining debut The Lexicon Of Love, they were slaughtering their reputation with the dull and desperate Beauty Stab.  Not to be cowed, they came back with this and How To Be A Zillionaire, styling themselves as cartoon characters and bringing some sparkle back.  When that didn’t quite cut it, they returned to the classic strings then veered off sharply into house music.  Martin Fry was last seen with Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory on board before trying with limited success to reform the original line-up.  What a mess.  Just let it be.
 
Will Junior grow up with dinosaurs or parodies, a smug scene with nothing new to back it up?  I suppose it’s like becoming a teenager in the early CD age, with everyone telling you that Dire Straits, Ry Cooder and the Robert Cray Band are the best artists in the world - she’ll know about all the thrusting young pups that the mainstream ignores.
 
She was cross with this song to begin with, clasping the Favourite Nursery Rhymes CD in her hand and stretching for the player’s open/close button, but soon its prettiness had her twisting and cooing.  She stuck it out to the end, unfazed at her mum walking in and saying, “This wouldn’t be from 1985, would it?” as if it were the most 80s track in the world.  And perhaps it is.

The deep clunk of a reverbed drum beat that throws ‘A View To A Kill’ in your face from the off startled Junior.  She was standing on the rug, gripping the handle of her new Miffy suitcase, and I fear she would’ve moved out if Nick Rhodes’ icy synths hadn’t brought some harsh melody to the party.  As gorgeous, pouting, peroxide-bequiffed John Taylor introduced the warm bass, our girl even started to dance.  With toy baby, of course - her new companion through the darkest times (bedtime).
 
Anyway, the James Bond instalment that this so racily soundtracks (I mean – a pop group doing a Bond theme!  Did you ever?) was the last film I went to see with my dad.  Sorry, my dad’s still around, he just never goes to the cinema – at least not with me, and rarely anyone else.  Whatever, it was rare even then, and all the more exciting because we were the only ones in Berkhamsted Rex for the showing, apart from a couple who were more interested in each other than Roger Moore’s excruciatingly geriatric attempts to grapple with Grace Jones.
 
This single only made it to No.2 – a pretty shocking result for what was then the world’s biggest band.  It all fell apart from there, alarmingly.  It’s very catchy, but very much a fit for the Duran template perfected with ‘Union Of The Snake’.  There should be a final mention too for the video, which hilariously plants the massively-haired band in the centre of the film’s action and gives Rhodes his regular opportunity to show off his Polaroid artiste skills.
 
Reminds me: Junior’s mum was given a Polaroid camera recently, for obscure reasons.  I’m going to make a rubbish collage.

The Top 40 still changed on a Tuesday back in 1985 – more precisely after Radio 1’s Newsbeat at 12.45pm, with ‘Woo’ Gary Davies playing the new Top 5 in full before anyone else.  Actually, he played five to two then counted down the entire 40 before revealing the No.1.  Beautiful drama.  This song is forever linked with that lunchtime countdown for me, in the hazy, shaded way the brain couples these things.  My parents wanted to get to the pub for a holiday ploughman’s and I delayed them until I heard where the ‘Fears were in the new chart.  No.2, never to climb any higher, to my regret.
 
I’m not all that bothered now.  For all its lightness of touch, it’s eventually too repetitive, even with its accomplished guitar fills.  Junior was painstakingly choosing which CD she wanted next, from a varied choice of Action Songs and Nursery Rhymes, and didn’t even flex a nerve to recognise a song was playing.  She’s harsh on the boys – I may be equivocal about the song after two decades of regular airings, but my admiration for the band continues to grow.
 
You see, in a world where your Coldplays and Keanes imitate – unwittingly, perhaps – every note TFF banged down with such gusto in the mid 80s, you really begin to appreciate who had the tunes, the hooks, the guile and, yep, the soul.