Song Of The Day 8/9/2016: The Flying Pickets – “Only You”

Quarterly Covers Report – Can I just say Week Of Lies was exhausting? Last week was the most writing I'd done in that amount of time since I ghost-wrote Atlas Shrugged. (They wound up not using my third act in which they all go to Vegas and get their hands on psychoactive drugs. "Too much like real life" they said.) And then it went over two days because of a silly idea I had that wound up taking three parts instead of the originally scheduled one. This is my work ethic. Get to the point where I have to do just one more thing, then go overboard. It was like Battle of the Network Stars. Anyway, as a result, this season's QCR is going to be five days instead of seven, which is fine because there were two entries I wasn't that excited about anyway.

Okay, so, here we have the Flying Pickets doing one of my favorite synth-pop songs, Yazoo's "Only You." This was what the British call a "Christmas number one" hit in 1983. Christmas number ones are some kind of big deal over in the motherland. I don't get the prestige factor, but I understand the sentimentality aspect. Quite often they are novelty songs or Christmas-themed hits, and recently they've been decided by dedicated campaigns for certain songs to land on top of the British charts on Christmas Day. Either than or reality show competitions. The Flying Pickets handle the vocals admirably, although I have a profound resistance to contemporary a cappella groups that almost certainly stems from overhearing the theme to the TV show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I like this one though. I can't figure out if the video is a parody or not. I'm saying yes because you're supposed to play comedy super-straight, like in Sausage Party.