19 September 1991 Oh, so blustery power ballads are edgy and cool now, are they? Well, no. It's just what rock bands do when they become big and lucrative. 'Don't Cry' and 'November Rain', so similar as to be interchangeable, are the two signature songs from this phase of the meanest, baddest rock band in … Continue reading Guns N’ Roses – ‘Don’t Cry’ →

12 September 1991 "Will Galway bate Mayo? / Not if they have Willie Joe!" I'll say straight away that, even though I'm from outside Dublin and therefore technically a culchie, this clearly isn't a song for me, if only because no Kerry person has ever fretted about beating Mayo. Giving a voice to the west … Continue reading The Saw Doctors – ‘Hay Wrap’ →

4 July 1991 Before we start laughing at the Brits for making this, at 16 weeks, their longest-running consecutive number one ever, keep in mind that it spent ten weeks at the top of the Irish charts before returning to number one a month later for one more week. People of Ireland: you have disgraced … Continue reading Bryan Adams – ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ →

27 June 1991 What's this, an '80s revival already? Well, actually Jason was still having hits at the start of the '90s - in fact, up to this point in mid-1991 he has more Irish top ten singles than Kylie (six versus five) plus now he has a '90s number one in Ireland and she … Continue reading Jason Donovan – ‘Any Dream Will Do’ →

13 June 1991 Do tourists to Paris visit Jim Morrison's grave any more? Certainly during my Seine-side years in the '00s and '10s the bigger attractions of Père Lachaise were Chopin, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde; just once I went to Morrison's tomb and aside from two nearby security guards I was the only person … Continue reading The Doors – ‘Light My Fire’ →

2 May 1991 Here we see one of the inherent risks involved with the '90s marketing strategy of releasing a huge tie-in single for your movie: what happens when the single gets so huge that it overshadows the movie? This was the first-world problem that afflicted Mermaids, what looks like an early-'60s-set rom-com starring Cher, … Continue reading Cher – ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)’ →

4 April 1991 Another four weeks at number one in Ireland for a Simpsons track, making it 13 weeks of 1991 in total. As much as I like classic Simpsons, I also like pop music, and I didn't need Simpsons merchandise at the top of the hit parade for a quarter of the year (or … Continue reading The Simpsons – ‘Deep, Deep Trouble’ →

28 March 1991 Sandwiched between two number one singles by Bart Simpson, Rod Stewart had been something of a blond spiky-haired cartoon himself for much of the '80s: the spandex-clad synth-rock playboy, the 'D'Ya Think I'm Sexy' ladies' man, and the like. However, at the turn of the decade he made a clear effort to … Continue reading Rod Stewart – ‘Rhythm Of My Heart’ →

24 January 1991 Poor me. Not only was I deprived of the UK terrestrial channels, but I was now also missing out on UK satellite TV, home to 1991's first big pop-cultural hit: The Simpsons. I had seen the prototype Simpsons shorts as part of The Tracey Ullmann Show, which was shown on RTÉ, but … Continue reading The Simpsons – ‘Do The Bartman’ →

17 January 1991 It's about devil worship! If you play it backwards you can hear satanic messages! Such was the chatter in my school and on night-time radio about this record. This was mostly based on the word "diabolique" in the lyrics, which were all in Latin and French; if we couldn't understand them, we … Continue reading Enigma – ‘Sadness (Part I)’ →