Song #82 on my Eighties’ top 100 list was all over the North American charts and on every radio’s playlist in the summer of 1993, despite it being released five years earlier. The relative lateness of its success was due mostly to the song’s (un)timely inclusion on the soundtrack for the quirky Rom-com film, “Benny & Joon”, starring Mary Stuart Masterson and Johnny Depp. The story as I’ve heard it (correct me if I’m wrong) is that Masterson convinced the film’s producers and director to include the song after she spent most of the filming listening to The Proclaimers’ 1988 album “Sunshine on Leith” on her Walkman.
The Proclaimers are a Scottish folk rock band composed of twin brothers Charlie and Craig Reid. They have released twelve full-length albums since 1987 but none quite so successful as “Sunshine on Leith”. This album and song were so ubiquitous at the time that my university campus pub chose to bring The Proclaimers in for a concert over bringing in The Jesus And Mary Chain. I sometimes wonder if that decision was ever regretted.
My fondest memory of this song goes back to the summer of 1993. I had spent three days hanging out with my high school friends, Tim and Zed, without sleep, and living on a diet of potato chips, McDonalds, and beer. On the third night, we had somehow managed to get dragged to a party in cottage country, an hour away from our hometown. By the time we arrived, the party was winding down and we decided to head back home after only staying a half hour. We caught a ride back into town with our friend Rudy in his pickup truck and we were flying along the unlit backroads in the wee hours of the morning when “500 miles” came on the radio. I’m pretty sure my friend Andrew was in the backseat of the truck and mentioned that he liked the song. Rudy responded by blasting the radio, effectively drowning out the impromptu singalong that ensued.
I’ll never know how I survived that summer but because of it, this song will forever have a place in my memories.
Original Eighties best 100 position: #86
Favourite lyric: “And if I haver, yeah, I know I’m gonna be / I’m gonna be the man who’s havering to you” I’ve never figured out what out “havering” means but I’m sure it’s romantic.
Where are they now?: The Proclaimers have been a going concern since their inception. Their most recent release was 2022’s “Dentures out”, which, much like the lion’s share of their latter output, I have yet to hear.
For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.
Spirit of the West are one of my favourite ever bands.
And I know what you’re thinking: This guy’s probably got thousands of favourite bands. Which is probably true. However, SOTW have been with me for a very long time, almost 35 years. A Canadian band with a unique sound that I got into at a time when most Canadian bands were trying to sound American. For a while, they were the band I had seen the most times in concert. In fact, my wife and I officially ‘got together’ after seeing the band at our university pub. I could go on and on but I’ve already tread this ground on these pages a number of times, most notably when I counted down my top five favourite tunes by the group back in 2017.
Having said all this, “Save this house” isn’t my favourite Spirit of the West album. Yes, it’s got some of their classic tracks (see below) and it’s got a great and unique folk rock sound but they were still finding their true footing here, being one album removed from being a fully formed band. Multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist Linda McRae had just joined the trio of Hugh McMillan, Geoffrey Kelly, and John Mann and their drummer Vince Ditrich had yet to join. The songwriting is very strong here for the most part but as a whole, the album is likely a couple tracks too long.
Still, as you can see, I’ve placed the group’s fourth album and first on major label, Warner Music Canada, in my top five for the year so you know I believe the album is worth your time. The songs are a bit of their time and place but can also be considered out of time. The band sings from a perspective with which I am very familiar and their instrumental prowess is understated but markedly better than some of their peers at the time, effortlessly sliding Celtic folk into an alt rock context. It’s an album, much like the rest of their catalogue, that deserves to be placed amongst the pantheon of great CanCon records but unfortunately, feels to me, largely forgotten.
So indulge me, if you will, and have a listen to “Save this house” in its entirety but if you are lacking the time, check out these three picks.
“Puttin’ up with the Joneses“: “Lock ’em up, and throw away the key, boys / The Joneses are not like you or me / Lock ’em up tight, ’cause if they had the chance they might / Show us that we’re wrong and that’s the one thing we can’t be.” My father got me a summer job working in the recycling plant division of the steel factory he worked at in the summer of 1995. For the first couple of weeks that I worked there, they didn’t know what to do with me and the other summer student that they had hired, so they had us scouring the barren fields on the property picking up scraps of metal that had floated down out of the air while they ran flattened cars through the ‘shredder’. I’ll always think of this song when I remember that summer because I sang the words to it to myself the whole time I was picking up these scraps. A song with a peppy rhythm put together with a non-stop acoustic strum, a popping bongo beat, and call and response vocals, words invoking everything I was feeling about the world in my youth. Questions of normalcy and what it all means, the relevance of life events, toeing the line or rebelling against it. A punk song that sounds more folk than The Pogues and that puts a smile on your face everytime.
“Save this house”: “The welcome mat’s worn out, the roof will never mend, the furniture’s on fire, this house is a disgrace. Someone change the locks before we trash this place.” The title track on the album is a three minute wonder that is very much relevant contextually to its era but is also quite prescient of the world events of the last few years. Starts off funky and haunting but at each chorus the guitars lose their effects and run at a straight ahead strum, racing at a pace that the bongos have a hard time keeping up with. The gang vocals add to the immediacy and invoke images of random and spontaneous jams at protest afterparties, a moment where everyone joins in, not just because they all know the words but more because there is a shared belief and conviction behind them. John Mann and company are bemoaning the state of the world, the politics and the environment, wondering aloud and not so conspicuously as to how we all got to this point and how we all let it happen. I’m still wondering the same.
“Home for a rest”: If, like me, you attended university in Canada in the 1990s (or in the years immediately following), you likely know this song or have drank and danced to it at some point whether you knew it or not. If you were not part of this cohort, you really don’t know what you’re missing. “By the light of the moon, she’d drift through the streets / A rare old perfume, so seductive and sweet / She’d tease us and flirt, as the pubs all closed down / Then walk us on home and deny us a round.” With universal, drinking song lyrics like this, “Home for a rest” has been considered by many an alternate Canadian national anthem, though it was never technically released as a single. I certainly love it and probably know the words just as well as I do “Oh Canada!”. I ranked it number two when I counted down my top five favourite by the band and placed it at number four in my Best tunes of 1990 list. I’ve danced to the wild music and have breathlessly sang along to all of these words so many times, in my room, at their shows, and on packed dance floors. And as I’ve written on these pages before, I was even coaxed up to a microphone by friends on a long ago green-beer-soaked Saint Patricks day at my old college pub, The Open End, to provide the slurring vocals when the entertainment for the evening couldn’t do it. This one has left an indelible mark on my life.
We’ll be back in a handful of days with album #4. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:
Great Big Sea has long since been a household name here in Canada and is relatively well-known elsewhere as well, counting amongst their fans actor Russell Crowe. They are likely the most famous band to come out of Newfoundland and for a while during the late 90s and into the 2000s, were one of the best-selling groups here, their high-energy folk and updated interpretations of traditional sea shanties obviously finding a home in the hearts of good Canadian youth.
It certainly found me on first listen with this very cover of Slade’s* “Run runaway”. I remember catching the video at some point in the summer of 1995 or 1996 on MuchMusic, right around the time their video for “Mari Mac” also caught my attention. It wasn’t long at all before these two songs could be heard from open residence room doors and through the open windows of student apartments all around Toronto. Both are excellent tunes but it was this re-interpretation that first sold me.
Slade’s original came out around the time that I was just finding my own feet with music, branching out from my parents’ oldies radio listening in the car and regularly watching the chumFM top 30 countdown on CityTV. I didn’t, of course, know this at the time, but this was Slade’s second go round and comeback venture, their biggest inroads into the North American market. They had been flirting with glam rock throughout the 70s and were quite popular at home in England. It took a cover by metal band Quiet Riot of their 70s hit “Cum on feel the noize” to finally drum up interest in the US, leading to a signing with a US label, and the first single released was, of course, “Run runaway”.
Recorded for their 11th studio album, “The amazing kamikaze syndrome”, “Run runaway” was very much of its time. It has soaring guitars that put together a stadium-ready hook and there’s those shout-along vocals that had me along for the ride, even though I didn’t understand them. But it was far from a sellout. Slade didn’t stray far from their roots, employing electric violin and adapting traditional Scottish jig elements for a hard rock world.
Then, more than a decade later, Great Big Sea, removed the rock and upped the traditional. Their cover has flutes, accordions and fiddles and is sung like a shanty. They even made it more upbeat, which I wouldn’t have thought possible as a pre-teen.
And though the original has the nostalgia factor going for it, I gotta give the edge to the cover here.
Cover:
Original:
*This is, I believe, the second cover of a Slade tune to find its way on to this list.
For the rest of the 100 best covers list, click here.
My (life in) music lists 