Monday Morning’s Earworm №115

I Want Your Love by Transvision Vamp

What is an earworm?

It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, from a cultural reference point, that stays in your head, that keeps bubbling up accompanying your day.

It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.

Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.

That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…

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I Want Your Love by Transvision Vamp

UK Chart peak: №5 US Chart peak: DNC

After deciding to feature this song as this week’s Monday Morning’s Earworm, I took to YouTube for a reminder of its perfect pop brilliance. But, while I sat here watching the official pop video, I wasn’t hit with the expected wave of nostalgia.

It was more a case of gentle unease: This is still a great song, I thought, and it still rocks my socks off, but there’s something off. I remembered the video, but it wasn’t the video I’d been remembering. And then, like Gandalf air-dancing with that Balrog, the penny dropped.

Numpty! This is the wrong song: It’s the other one you’re thinking of. I’d been watching the video for “Baby I Don’t Care”, when I’d been thinking of “I Want Your Love”. If you’re going to misremember a song, you might as well mistake it for another equally tremendous pop-belter by the same group.

What a fabulous mistake. It felt like I’d started the day by giving myself the best of all pop bonuses.

Inconceivable!

When I turned to old pals Officialcharts.com and Wikipedia, I found that “Baby I Don’t Care” had only got to №3 in the UK in 1989. Ah, so it must’ve been their other tune, “I Want Your Love” that was the №1 smash. But no, that only got to №5, which is when I quoted a certain infamous cinematic Sicilian.

It turned out the band’s only UK №1 had been their second album, Velveteen. The first album, Pop Art, which is home to this morning’s tune, only got as high as №4 in 1988.

About the Band of This Morning’s Moment

Tranvision Vamp was formed in 1986 in Putney, London, by Wendy James and Nick Christian Sayer. They would recruit Dave Parsons (bass), Tex Axile (keyboards), and Pol Burton (drums) to complete the original full lineup. Sayer would be the main songwriter in the group, but when they eventually split in February 1992, he didn’t pursue a solo career.

The split wasn’t so surprising, given that after two UK top-five albums, the third one sank without a trace. Their label, MCA, had quashed the release of 3rd album, Little Magnets Versus the Bubble of Babble, because they didn’t like the direction it was taking.

About the Song of this Morning’s Moment

“I Want Your Love” was the third single from the band’s first album, Pop Art, after “Revolution Baby” and “Tell That Girl to Shut Up”. It would be the only one of the album’s five singles to crack the top 40 by getting to №5 in the UK charts.

Released in June of 1988 on MCA, it was, as part of Pop Art, produced by Duncan Bridgman and the amazingly named Zeus B.Held, who, if he’s not one of Frank Zappa’s kids along with Moon and Dweezil, must be an alias.

Pop Art would top “I Want Your Love” by one place in the charts, getting as high as №4 in the UK album charts, less than two weeks after its release on the 3rd of October 1988.

Postscript

I had to chuckle at this delicious piece of peroxide pot calling the platinum kettle black from Pop Art’s Wikipedia page:

“In №1 (a now defunct 80s pop-mag), Patsy Kensit called the group “a band known more for their big mouths than their music” and commented, “What a shame after all their rantings they have come up with a package that is so astoundingly average.”

The magazine later listed Pop Art — alongside the album Fearless by Kensit’s band Eighth Wonder, in a section titled “Silly Blondes” — as one of the year’s “stinkers”.

However, the lads and lass from Transvision Vamp would have the last laugh by some 43 places on the album charts.

Recommended Listening:

Pop Art, Transvision Vamp, MCA, 1988

As ever, tell me in the comments what you thought of this week’s earworm.