Dr Spin 'Tetris'

Chart Peak: 6

YouTube

When I first started doing this, part of the appeal was to try out the Now albums as snapshots of the times when they were released. My thinking was that they might be more effective than the "official" histories of the years, which have a habit of concentrating on the notionally important. Here's where I feel I've struck some sort of gold, with a record that really could not be more of its time: a novelty dance version of the music from the eponymous Game Boy game, which is of course based on the old Russian song Коробейники, as I would obviously have known without looking it up on the internet. The sound effects are obviously referring to the club hits of the time, and even the name Dr Spin has a sort of early-1990s topicality about it.

It wasn't publicised at the time, but this was of course a pseudonym for Andrew Lloyd-Webber and his long-serving musical director Nigel Wright. Well, I say "of course" but actually it's not instantly obvious to me what the Llord does contribute to this track, unless it's those "comedy" Russian accents. This sort of reminds me of the long-standing tradition of supposedly uncool acts releasing music anonymously to see how much more seriously they're taken without the association of the name (not very, most of the time) or supposedly cool ones working under pseudonyms to avoid embarrassment. But this seems a bit too pointless for its own good.

Still a lot better than Undercover though.