James' Blog - Songs

The Jim Steinman single that time forgot. Lifted from his reluctant solo album Bad For Good, it is a ten-minute epic which runs through every one of his favourite lyrical obsessions. And it is one of my favourite songs ever.

Crash by The Primitives. And James' curious quest to find out why one of his favourite radio stations continually insists on playing a really terrible version of it.

A brief history of Five Star and what should have been their final Top 40 hit at the tail end of 1988. But fate had other ideas.

One of the great lost songs in the Morrissey canon. But also for the lady who recorded it - Sandie Shaw.

A brief history of the anti-apartheid songs that weren't Free Nelson Mandela.

The story of Rex Bob Lowenstein, the gentle ballad about a DJ who cared too much that will forever carry so much resonance for people involved in broadcasting.

One of Jim Steinman's many forgotten classics. The song written for the climax of flop 1984 film "Streets Of Fire" but whose depiction in the film manages to create everyone's fantasy rock concert.

The Sex Pistols, and the enduring myth surrounding God Save The Queen and the way people are falsely convinced it was denied the Number One position by conspiracy.

Controversial take: Merry Xmas Everybody is rubbish, and Slade actually deserved to go down in Christmas chart history a full decade later. Find out inside why the corridor had a better echo.

The story of Faith No More's overlooked and now forgotten musical swansong. Which was a curiously faithful cover of a similarly overlooked and mostly forgotten Bee Gees song.

My eulogy to the apparently unloved short-lived girl group Girl Thing. Widely held up as one of Simon Cowell's biggest musical disasters. But they were actually far better than you remember or they were ever given credit for.