LOST IN SHANGRI-LA LAND!

At its best, it can be the most beautiful sin in the world, at it’s worst it dies.

Perfect Pop is a myth. Pop music’s imperfections are what makes it.

Fragility and tenderness, uncertainty and dubious musical skills... Pop music fires us and supports us. Well, it does me, so sod the rest of you and your sodden elitism (and no, Baby Bird is not Pop music - just music for people with mortgages, who will never know what real passion is.)

Yes, the Shangri-Las, from their birth in 1964 to their death in the late 60s amid rumours of gunrunning and kidnapping, were nothing but 18 carat angels with shiny boots and shiny hair. Songs like ‘Out in the Streets’, ‘Past, Present and Future’ and ‘He Cried’ are simultaneously jam packed with yearning and spurning and a healthy dose of sass. Life for me, could never be as sweet without them.

Of course it had to end sometime. Not long after a failed comeback in the 70s, founding member Mary Ann Ganser died of a suspected drug overdose. As is so often the way with great Pop music, its practitioners burn out, leaving only their music behind to haunt our dreams and destroy our apathy.

So what? Just a gaggle of talentless girls who never wrote their own songs or even picked up an instrument? Who gives a fuck?

Write your own songs, play your own instruments, possess ounces of musical talent, and what do you get?

That’s right; Ocean Colour Scene, Baby Bird, Mansun, Del Amitri for fuck’s sake.

The choice is yours.

P.S. Girls invented rock’n’roll, boys just added crap guitar solos!

By Tamsin