The above is the cover of Precious, a compilation CD from 1992 released on Dino Entertainment, a label whose sole existence seemed to be around compiling and issuing CDs around one theme or another.
This particular compilation has the catalogue number of DINCD 38. The earliest number listed on Discogs is DINCD 4, for Eighties Access, a 14-song compilation of big hits from household names ranging from ABC to Yazoo, while the last in the series seems to be DINCD139, for The Very Best Of Brass, a 3xCD effort with 64 tracks from what I am sure are household names among aficionados of that genre.
Precious has 20 songs squeezed across a single CD. All 20 of the bands are listed on the front cover, and I’m sure just about all of them are familiar to you.
But surely I’m not alone in drawing a blank on this lot:-
mp3: Spaghetti Head – Glad
What now follows is a cut’n’paste from a now defunct blog called Left and To The Back, which was the work of 23 Daves between 2008 and 2024. The blog was described as “exploring the dark and dusty world of flop singles and albums, the kind you may find lingering near the stock room of your local second hand record store (if you still have one), or perhaps going for extortionate sums on ebay.”
It wasn’t a blog I was previously aware of, but flicking through its old content (the text is still there but the links to the mp3s are, understandably, all defunct), it makes for a great read. In the November 2016 archives, you can find this:-
“If Stiltskin hit number one by being a Smashing Pumpkins tribute band for the benefit of a Levis advert, Spaghetti Head could perhaps be regarded as the era’s Miller Lite advert EMF clones. The beer’s advert during the early nineties – frustratingly unavailable on YouTube – had this single as its soundtrack, presumably created in order to persuade fans of bands who bashed their synthesisers around angrily to quaff light lager. Well, it was a huge youth market, after all (for about six months).
Glad undergoes a major lyrical transformation for this single, but otherwise the track sounds much as it did on the ad. It’s hyperactive, busy, slightly funky and frivolous. While all involved obviously anticipated a hit single, it’s also clear that nobody was taking this terribly seriously. Still, with its truly nagging catchiness it could actually have been a Jeans On for the nineties, but sales were clearly disappointing, and the track was most commonly encountered by listeners on the Indie compilation LP Precious – sequenced between Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine, for some baffling reason.
The man behind the track is Tony Gibber, who appears to have had a long career in soundtracking films and television programmes, perhaps being most famous for the 2003 Top of the Pops theme Get Out Of That. Somebody with the name Tony Gibber also seems to have been associated with the production and arrangement of some Bucks Fizz singles in the eighties, and had two singles of his own out on WEA in 1979 and 1980. I can’t prove that it’s definitely the same person, so this speculation on my part would have Wikipedia’s “citation needed” alarms ringing, but it seems likely.
If it is, we can only assume he would have at least been in his thirties by the time this came out. Had it been a hit, he might have looked a bit “interesting” performing the song on Top Of The Pops with his baseball cap on backwards, so it’s a shame that appearance never came to pass.”
My huge thanks to 23Daves….and I really hope he doesn’t mind that I’ve lifted so liberally from his site.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 