Back! Back! BACK!
Jun 9, 2019 · 3 minute readI’ve been waiting for The Story of 1988 for a long time. The school year of 1988/89 was a weird time for me; due to a quirk of class sizes and where birthdays fell, most of my friends skipped Class 3 and went straight into Class 2. I responded to this by having an odd year: Ian went Pop. I don’t really have any other way of describing it; I was one of the popular members of the class. I was the one who brought in Smash Hits, the one who knew about house music, and the one who hung out with everybody.
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I really can’t work out who that person was. But I still have some of their copies of Smash Hits. And The Story of 1988 is part one of their Imperial Phase. Tiffany, Kylie, S-Express, Bomb The Bass, The Primitives, Yazz, The PSBs, Wendy James…
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Sorry, Transvision Vamp flashes.
Paddy McAloon doing ‘hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque’ with all the conviction of the world, Now 11 through Now 13, the blackest of Black Type, and taking the piss out of Paul “Macca Wacca Thumbs Aloft” McCartney every fortnight.
Anyway, it mostly lived up to my expectations, with one glaring omission: No Timelords. Not entirely sure whether that’s down to the Glitter connection or whether they’re just saving it for The KLF proper, but given that The Manual also came out in 1988, it was weird for them to not even get a cursory mention either in the programme itself or the follow up Hits programme. Obviously, the Christmas performance isn’t going to be broadcast, but they’re surely going to show the actual Number One performance which doesn’t feature Glitter at all, right?1
Incidentally, Pop Ian reverted back to Normal Ian in Class 2. Honestly, I think Pop Ian would have been annoying to live with from 10-16, so it was probably for the best. Now, of course, I am doing with the kids at all times, surfing on the information superhighway and using emoticons. That’s what the cool kids are using today, right?
Just under 7,000 words on the book this week. Oh, and I added an extra chapter for fun. It’s a useful chapter, I think - who doesn’t want to know about how to debug neural networks? But maybe not the best time to add it so close to the impending Deadline of Doom. On the other hand, it is pretty much finished…
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After re-watching the programme with a very confused American, I did notice that there’s a two second clip of them at the start. Incidentally, I highly recommend finding an American to watch the show with you. “Who are all these people?", “Why do you call them bross instead of bro s?” “He looks like a slightly Asian Stephen Fry!” It’s very entertaining. ↩︎