Please excuse Lee from posting this week as he has a nasty eye infection and won’t be able to go to work where he keeps all the music files and pictures he needs to blog on his computer.

Yours sincerely,
Mrs. LondonLee

I’ve made some minor changes to the links over on the left, added a few new ones and got rid of some others. The main thing I’ve done is move Popular to the top because that’s where I’m spending a lot of online time these days. If you’re not reading Tom Ewing’s herculean and brilliant effort to review every UK Number One hit single then you should be, particularly as he’s up to 1980 now which is smack dab in the middle of what I consider “my” era, and probably a lot of yours too.

I couldn’t be so common as to post a song that got all the way to Number One on the charts, so instead here’s one from 1980 that only managed to get as far as #16. What a bloody great year it was, but I would say that wouldn’t I?

Download: You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties – Jona Lewie (mp3)

If anyone tried to visit this blog yesterday they would have noticed that it wasn’t available. Bit of a cock-up at my end I’m afraid, I forgot to renew my account with my web hosting service and by the time I realized I missed the due date they’d taken me down. So I had a whip round and did some busking to raise the necessary funds and I’m back again. Though posting has been a little on and off here lately so I wouldn’t be surprised if no one even noticed I was gone for a day.

Anyway, how about some obscure New Wave from 1979? The title seems appropriate. I know very little about The Zones except they were Scottish and featured former and future members of Slik, The Skids and Simple Minds in their lineup but this is, as they say, a cracker.

Download: New Life – The Zones (mp3)

I can’t write my way out of a paper bag at the moment. I must have half a dozen new posts on the go but I’m incapable of finishing any of them off. Either it’s because:

1) I’m too busy
2) I’m too lazy
3) What I’m writing is a load of bollocks anyway
4) I’m having an existential blogging crisis and can’t see the point
5) I’ve lost my mojo

What do you think, Graham?

Download: Don’t Ask Me Questions – Graham Parker & The Rumour (mp3)

You don’t hear this track much these days, do you? Not that I listen to the radio anymore, just a feeling I have that it’s sort of slipped off the radar. Whatever, a really great single from 1978.

In the meantime I’ve done some blog housekeeping and added a whole bunch of new links at the right. I especially like Another Nickel In The Machine which is the sort of blog I’d give my left nut to be able to write if I only could find the time, wasn’t so lazy etc. etc.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley
The Go-Between (1953)

There used to be this tiny little old sweet shop near where I lived in London that was like some relic from a previous era. It was a dark and dingy place that rarely had any customers, run by an old lady who lived in the back of the shop. Behind the counter on it’s old wooden shelves stood a few big plastic jars of Cough Candy, Bonbons, Kola Kubes, Acid Drops and Lemon Sherbets which were sold loosely in plain paper bags, a quarter pound at a time. When I was a kid all the sweet shops in England sold candy like that but the reason I always remember this shop is it carried on doing it this way well into the 1980s when that old, slow, and terribly English way of doing things was being swept away by the radical new broom that was Maggie Thatcher. As the area around it gradually became more gentrified and swanky with the other shops replaced by tapas bars and estate agents there it stood, looking increasingly lonely and forlorn with its peeling paint and dirty windows, a shabby museum of an England that was fading into history. Those few jars of sweets seemed to be the only stock the shop had left as if the old lady was hanging on until the last Cough Candy was sold. It eventually died sometime in the late 80s and I think there’s a hair salon on the spot today. I know it would make this story better if it had been replaced by a McDonald’s or Starbucks but life isn’t always as neatly symbolic as that.

So what does all this have to do with the price of fish? Well, this blog is sort of like that sweet shop: a time capsule of the past, a melancholy little place stocked with tatty old crap and a musty air of wistful nostalgia for a vanished time and place. This will be a lot more personal and idiosyncratic than The Number One Songs In Heaven (it’s a local shop for local people) and some of you might be a bit shocked how rubbish my taste in music was and still is at times.

I assume most of you know the title of this blog comes from Jilted John’s eponymous 1978 single. Its classic line “I was so upset I cried all the way to the chip shop” is one of the quintessentially English pop lyrics, a mopey melodrama sung in a runny-nosed voice as wet as a Bank Holiday in Margate. It’s silly and pathetic but also quite poignant, turning mundane miserablism into something romantically tragic as much as weeping over a dying old sweet shop does. A friend of mine thinks that one line was the inspiration for Morrissey’s entire oeuvre.

Download: Jilted John – Jilted John (mp3)
From: True Love Confessions (album)