dire straits

[15] Steely Dan, ‘Do It Again’

Steely Dan

“I know Steely Dan, I met him at school.” Perhaps Fagen and Becker really did pop into Junior’s school to deliver a talk called – I don’t know – Get With It, Daddio: Sneaking Jazz into Lugubrious Contemporary Rock, but one thing I’m sure of: if I’d met the Dan at school I’d have stifled a yawn and sloped off to play tennis ball football.

You see, more than anything else, more than Phil Collins, Dire Straits or our pal Eric Clapton, in the early 80s Steely Dan epitomised Dad Rock for us. Those others troubled the charts quite seriously, but the Dan only appeared on old boys’ stereos, their liquid grooves and terribly precise harmonies finding a frequency that would instantly dispatch a schoolboy to the Land of Nod. Even in 1989, when De La Soul’s ‘Eye Know’ sent me off in search of ‘Peg’, I still detested ‘Deacon Blues’ and the rest of the queasily perfect aural furniture on Aja.

According to Last.fm, in the past five months I’ve played ‘Deacon Blues’ six times.

Says more than any amount of grey hair, right? So, in the rich tradition of hilarious, ageing voltes-faces, let’s recognise that ‘Do It Again’ is terrific, its easy funk played faultlessly, its smug delivery pitched the righteous side of incredibly annoying. And to undercut my generation gap theories, Junior says she hasn’t got enough thumbs to express how thumbs-up the song is.

[13] Duran Duran, ‘Skin Trade’

Like a typical Duranie of the period, Junior was indifferent to this. There was a brief slapping of the thighs at the start, yet attention soon turned to the socks. So, what made the fans desert in their droves? I don’t think it’s a bad record even now, but it was the first to miss the Top 10 in years. Maybe it’s because it had an almost intelligible lyric.

Arcadia and the Power Station diluted the fanbase and the preceding single ‘Notorious’ scraped to No.7 on comeback power alone. A-ha had nicked the girls and the CD age had come and populated the chart’s upper reaches with the more ‘serious’ artists. The biggest bands in the country were now Dire Straits and U2. Duran Duran’s fabled mix of the Sex Pistols and Chic – without the Sex Pistols and the disco joy – wasn’t cutting the ice.

So, Simon, we’ve explained the reason for this strange behaviour. Perhaps you shouldn’t have allowed all those Taylors to jump ship, and then replaced them with AMERICANS.