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 Ullman 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)’ →