1988 HEADLINE NEWS DISASTER ON PIPER ALPHA - PAN AM 103 CRASHED AT LOCKERBIE - BEN JOHNSON STRIPPEO OF 100M OLYMPIC GOLD AFTER POSITIVE DOPE TEST - SNP’S JIM SILLARS WON GOVAN BY—ELECTION - FAULTY SIGNAL BLAMED FOR CLAPHAM RAIL CRASH
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" MUSIC
Win had one; so did Simple Minds, and The Shamen came close — having a song used in a McEwan’s Lager ad, that is. Aberdeen’s finest psychedelic rockers were all set to supply a version of their song ‘Happy Days’ until some hip McEwan’s employee noticed that song was actually a protest song about media propaganda during the Falklands war. The Evening Times also noticed that the boys seemed to talk about drugs rather a lot in interviews and the gaffe was blown. A dance- orientated version of The Shamen went on to court further drug-related controversy with the infamous ‘Eeezer good’ chant in one of their later hits.
THIS WAS THE LIST THAT WAS
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All in all it’s great dance music, but being the cynic that I am, I can’t see it lasting more ' i ‘ than a couple of months.
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‘lt’s got to be-e-e-e Per-fect.’ A relentlessly perky song which was overplayed, and then some, before being used for an even more irritating Asda ad. Fairground Attraction, fronted by Irvine-born singer Eddi Reader, always suffered from the huge first hit syndrome which pretty much overshadowed their subtler songwriting talents. ‘lt’s a very defiant song,’ said Eddi at the time. ‘lt’s real — it’s not written by a computer, or masterminded by a producer with three houses and five cars.’ Music played on proper instruments; those were the days, eh?
< DANCE
Flamboyant ballet brat Michael Clark
A THEATRE The Mahabharata is the longest poem in the world and Peter Brook’s production of the Sanskrit legend was an epic to match. ‘We get the odd fainter but the biggest problem is waking people up and getting them to go,’ said an unnamed staff member. Long it may have been (nine hours, actually) but for most theatre-goers who saw this remarkable production, it was an unforgettable experience. The Mahabharata also convinced Glasgow City Council that after spending
£75,000 on - ,. preparing the formerly; .- transport museum ' for the production, Tramway should become a permanent arts ‘ venue. The rest, as 4 they say, is history
/ pulled on a Celtic jersey for a kickabout during I Am Curious, Orange, I This which featured the dancer’s usual button-nosed camp followers, including outrageous little girl called Bjiirk ~ dresser-upper leigh Bowery (RIP).
Even more bizarre was the fact “ ~ that Clark had collaborated with grumpy anti-artist Mark E. Smith, whose band The Fall provided a suitably ferocious soundtrack to complement the ballet’s themes of
fronted a squawklng indie band from Iceland, before blossoming into the darling of the style magazines we know and love . . . thousands queued to see the Gold of the Pharoahs in Edinburgh . . .
RSAMD moved into its new football and home in Glasgow. . . llicky a religious Campbell first spun the Wheel “90"!!- of Fortune . . . Harry Enfield ‘“
encapsulated the ‘greed is The
good’ Thatcher years with his Loadsamoney character . . . Well over a million people visited Glasgow’s Garden Festival.
ballet was loosely based on an exploration of King Billy’s imagined homosexuality, but Clark admitted that history was never his strongest subject.