Young Heart Attack — Starlight
America discovers Slade (okay, that might just be my brain losing it again). And adds a female vocalist. Anybody who knows anything about me is probably shaking their head in sad recognition now. But trust me, this is good, and I promise there's no ethereal section in sight. Not that you'd see an ethereal section, unless you were a bat. Which might confuse them. I wonder if anybody has done a study on the effects of Enya on a bat population. I sense a grant proposal!
MJ Hibbett — Hey Hey 16K
This song will be largely incomprehensible to Americans, for which I apologise. Anybody younger than a certain age may also not understand why "Then five minutes fingers crossed hoping not to witness the terror of R: Tape Loading Error" resonates so well with all the people in the their twenties. For this song is a celebration of the Little Computer That Could, the Sinclair Spectrum (sure, it namechecks inferior machines like the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC, but references to Jetpac, Jet Set Willy, and Manic Miner mean that the writer grew up with a humble Speccy. Plus the intro is sampled from a Spectrum's tape loading signal. And yes, that sound is burnt into my memory). Listen, then, to the geekiest song of the year, and reminisce about typing RANDOMIZE USR 32768 to get a game to load, how 128K seemed enough for anybody, and Impactor's tragic death in Transformers #88. That last one might just be me and Brem X Jones, though…