Weird musical things again.

Wow, two posts in as many days. You should be excited. Well, it is, until you find I’m going to warble on about music again. See, I’ve made another musical discovery.

Turn the clock back to 1989. I get my very first stereo the year before. It had a radio, cassette deck and nothing much else. One thing was important though, I could record things off the radio AND my own voice! And I did, in abundance. I still have tapes filled with radio clippings from the early 80s and early 90s.

One tape I had, was a Yashima brand tape. Chad will remember these (if he even reads these anymore) as they had a pungent aroma of cheese, had the inability to store Spectrum games, and were prone to snapping easily.

There are plenty of little snippets of music, some I’ve identified, some I pretty much wore out (particularly the 9 seconds of “The Way it Is” which was my only source of the song for about 5 years), and some I thought were too obscure to ever hear again, particularly this little snippet. It’s not even 2 seconds long. I’d some little searches in lyrics for possible solutions, and wouldn’t you know it, nothing even came close. Listening to that clip, it’s quite easy to pick up “Laa-aand of make believe” (oh, and yes, that’s a 9, possibly 10 year-old me shouting “testing”)

Up comes my bus ride to work this morning. It wasn’t unusual. I was listening to a 2003 episode of “Crap From The Past”, a US radio show, which I must talk about in greater detail later.

Up steps a particular song. Hey, I like the guitar intro of it, not bad. And, the vocals sounds strangely familiar… could that mystery line actually be in this song? The answer. YES! 41 seconds into it, that particular 1.6 seconds of audio is featured, and it turned out that the line was actually “No amount of make believe”. No wonder I couldn’t bloody find it.

Thanks to the wonderment of the interwebs, I can, of course, embed the entire song here, so you can listen to it. It’ll mean far less to you as it does to me, but still, you might enjoy it

Turns out the song was “Dreamland” by Australian band Midnight Oil. Now comes the tricky part…. trying to find the CD it was on. Oh, wait! I already HAVE the CD! Turns out I actually bought it 12 days ago, paid 40p for it and never even knew that song was on there!

Finally found a clip of “Okavango”

I’ve whittered on about this a good few times, and you’ll know this if you’re a regular viewer, but there was an entirely forgettable show on The Disney Channel called “Okavango”. It aired in the mid nineties, and it disappeared without trace. No other channel over here showed it, as far as I’m aware. This led me, until a few moments ago, to believe it was a Disney production. Turns out it wasn’t. It was produced by “Gibraltar Entertainment”.

Anyway, the show itself is forgettable. It’s about a family that move from somewhere in Suburbia to, I assume, the Okavango Delta. I cared not for its plot, but what I did like was the theme music. Again, I’ve mentioned at least three times that I managed to source the MP3, and it was the first MP3 I ever purchased. Its name is “Invent Yourself”, by Julian Laxton

Because of copyright and all that jazz, I obviously couldn’t put the MP3 on here, so I’ve been searching the interwebs (or rather Youtube) for a clean copy of the theme I can link to, and as if by magic… here’s not only the theme, but a complete episode!

EDIT FEB 2016: Oh, you know what? It’s gone off Youtube now. Can’t seem to find another video either. Bah.

Before you rush to press play, I must warn you it’s in Russian. Incredibly badly dubbed Russian at that. But, if you can put up with some Russian bloke reading out the on-screen text, then you can appreciate this awesome theme. Skip to the end of the video (23:40) if you just want to hear the music. Note how there’s no credits for the music composer. Shame on you, Gibraltar Films or whatever you’re called.