RANDOM CD SINGLE (1)

Last week's posting on Geneva made me delve a bit more into the shelf that holds the 5"CD singles and promo discs that aren't in inside plastic cases...and because of this they don't have a place in my anally-retentive alphabetical system. And every now and again I'll share one of them with you.

I'm sure many of you know that Bjork enjoyed a fair bit of fame pre-solo career with Sugarcubes, who until the recent emergence of Sigur Ros were probably about the only Icelandic pop act many of us could name. They formed in 1986, and went onto release three LPs on One Little Indian to mixed critical acclaim.

The debut LP Life's Too Good was almost universally praised, with most focus being on the extraordinary vocal style of the gorgeous looking female lead singer. Indeed, lead-off single Birthday, was voted #1 in John Peel's Festive Fifty in 1987. Surely the only ever record about a love affair between a five year old girl and her 50-year old neighbour.....if the tabloids had been able to make out the lyrics there wouls surely have been an outcry.

All of this attention and focus on Bjork didn't sit entirely well with Einar Benediktsson the other vocalist in the group. The follow-up LP Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week! featured far more of his contributions than before, a situation that led at least one reviewer to advise listeners that if they wanted to remain fans of the bands there were a number of tracks that the skip button had surely been invented for.

The band were in a sort of limbo.....too successful to be simply a cult indie band, but unable to make the leap into pop stardom via Radio 1 daytime exposure and Smash Hits magazine. They had one more go with Stick Around For Joy, recorded at quite an expense in New York, which contained a fair smattering of great pop songs that should have been smashes including Hit, which went Top 20 in the UK at the tail end of 1991 and got them on Top Of The Pops:-




Things might have turned out different if the follow-up single had enjoyed similar success, but despite it being even more commercial than Hit, it sold dismally:-

mp3 : Sugarcubes - Walkabout

The inevitable break-up of the band happened not long after. Bjork of course released a debut LP within 18 months that turned her into a global superstar.

There were three other songs on the CD single, one of which is a painful to listen to Einar effort, one is a cover version of a cheesy pop single from the early 70s and the other is something that wouldn't have been too out of place on the debut LP:-

mp3 : Sugarcubes - Stone Drill-In The Rock
mp3 : Sugarcubes - Top Of The World
mp3 : Sugarcubes - Bravo Pop

On 17th November 2006, the band reformed for a one-off concert in Reykjavik to mark their 20th Anniversary. Maybe if we're lucky they will get back together in 2011 and do a tour....