16 March 1985
Hurrah, it’s Stock, Aitken and Waterman! Here’s the first-ever SAW UK or Ireland number one single, and while they certainly ruled the late-’80s pop scene, culminating in the final chart-topper of the decade, ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’ doesn’t really foreshadow the nature of that reign. For one thing, it’s pure hi-NRG disco, where their later tracks have pretensions to a sort of ’80s northern soul sound. Also, this is just a SAW production job; pretty soon they’d be writing their own songs too. But I’ll have plenty of later opportunities to examine the SAW canon in depth; lucky me.
Hurrah, it’s Pete Burns! Later a celebrity reality TV star in the ’00s, Burns was one of those quintessentially English public eccentrics: often infuriating and difficult, not quite a national treasure, but then noticeable by their absence. A few days after he died in 2016, the opening routine of that week’s Strictly Come Dancing was in his honour, and you can’t get a more mainstream tribute than that.
Okay, so as a pop star Burns was a one-hit wonder. But what a hit! ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’—and yes, I’m copy-and-pasting the title each time—is immense. Where it falls short of the sonic blitzkrieg of ‘Relax’ or ‘Two Tribes’, it makes up the difference by force of Burns’ personality. He dominates this. Credit also his writing and singing; that unwieldy title is gleefully warped and twisted into one hell of a catchy chorus. The SAW connection makes for a neat chart factoid, but ultimately this is Pete Burns’ record and he’s what makes it great.
