NOW 15 - Summer ‘89: Matthew Horton

August 1989.

The final year of ‘the finest pop decade ever’™️ is moving along quite nicely thank you very much. 

There’s most definitely a change in the air, and we don’t mean the launch of the FOUR channel Sky TV network. Relax everyone, UK Gold and TOTP reruns are coming in three years!

No, real change was coming. The second summer of love in 1988 (sorry Danny Wilson, probably a year out) as witnessed on the utterly imperial NOW 11, 12 and 13 had demonstrated that the 90s were calling and they would be decked out in dayglo. And most importantly a new positivity was being felt in the air, across the airwaves and through the pop we were all immersed in.

And let’s not beat about the bush, folks, 1989 was a seismic year for music. Let me indulge you listeners:

Disintegration, Three Feet High and Rising, Doolittle, Technique, Club Classics Volume One, Raw Like Sushi, The Stone Roses, , Like A Prayer, Hats, The Seeds of Love, Flowers In The Dirt, Paul’s Boutique, The Raw And The Cooked…

And of course Neither Fish Nor Flesh (A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction).

And so, to our favourite compiler of variously compiled pop. 1989 saw four (yes, as many as that!) new NOW, That’s What I Call Music albums. Why four, I hear you cry? Well, because the summer was adorned with the first new dance volume since 1986, an album that, NOW fans will know, featured Love Can’t Turn Around by Farley Jackmaster Funk - the first House track to break the UK. And 1989 was time (not for the guru, that’s 1990 of course) to celebrate how dance was back, Back, BACK!

And this additionally delicious dance volume enabled the BIG summer fifteenth volume to go deeper into the year’s genres. So step forward delights including Soul II Soul’s era defining classic, Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass-adorned celebration of TV dinners, Swing Out Sister’s mind-bending, sumptuous sixties throwback and De La Soul’s daisy-age makeover of Hall and Oates (the ultimate backward nod to the outgoing 80s?).

What a time to be on the edge of seventeen (deliberate Stevie Nicks nod, there) as this listener was!

And joining me for this sepia-tinged and frankly tear-stained 1989 nostalgia fest through NOW 15 is the music journalist and author of the 33 1/3 book on George Michael's Faith, Matthew Horton.

Discover how homemade mixtapes (his mums AND his own) inspired many a house party and achieved (almost) legendary status. Which cassettes were stuck in his Walkman at the outdoor Lido pool, why goth stars and American soap operas need to come together, which rapper performed for Matthew (and others, obviously) at Bristol University and (YES!) why the love for Fish and Flesh will never go away.

And amongst these glittering 1989 delights, experience the moments when I actually say positive things (almost) about our friends from the north The Beautiful South and Hue and Cry.

Join us on the glorious beach (best cover ever™️ - Jude Rogers) as we head back to NOW15. 

I think it’s going to be alright.

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