I know just what you're thinking

[venta]

On Fridays this year, we ask...

What's in the Box?

The Box in question is the glovebox of my car, home to my extremely motley tape collection. By the time I owned a car with a tape player tapes were on the way out and most of my music was in CD format. However, charity shops were practically giving tapes away, which meant that I bought rapaciously and eclectically. A half-remembered 80s band who once released a single I'd liked a little ? A band I'd vaguely heard of ? An unknown group with good cover art ? Bring them on.

Of course, the net result is that I've ended up with a tape collection which any music-lover would be slightly ashamed of. There was a relatively narrow window (late 70s to later 80s) when tapes were big news, and my horde represents that. However, in amongst the terrible pop I've found some gems and I reckon its time to come clean about my guilty musical secrets.

In The Box this week we have:

No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom

I have a nasty feeling that there a probably a thousand No Doubt fans out there ready to call me a sell-out: I don't own any albums before Tragic Kingdom, and I don't own anything after it either. I just own the album which had all the big hits on it.

When choosing which track to post, I went to consult Wikipedia to see which had been released at singles. The answer was pretty much all of them; I managed to hunt out one that hadn't been, but it was quite tricky.

So... No Doubt. Mostly famous as a vehicle for Gwen Stefani, I was vaguely surprised to find them described as a ska band. Actually, it's not unreasonable. Just custom and usage has led me to expect ska bands to be vaguely shouty and exclusively male. It's probably not helped that their most famous track, Don't Speak really isn't very ska at all.

No Doubt - Happy Now

[Poll #1154166]

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Probably my favourite WitB so far!

I'll probably go and poke around their other stuff now. I'd only ever heard Don't Speak and Hey Baby, neither of which I found particularly to my taste.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

That album has too much memory attached to it, sadly. It was the first album I bought, on tape, on a cross channel ferry. That was the time I found out that if you have a pocket full of francs and pounds that each don't really add up to the full amount, you cannot in fact pay in a combination of the two currencies. It was horribly embarrassing.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

(I was 13 at the time, I think.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Probably a similar experience to trying to buy a book in Austria, then realising at the till that you're over the border and in Germany, and thus the price was in Deutschmarks not Schillings, and is thus around 8 times more expensive than what you had thought when you decided to buy it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it's just a bit so-what to me. Maybe that's why they didn't release it as a single.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

their most famous track, 'Don't Speak'

Really? Over Ex-Girlfriend or Just a Girl? Go figure.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Just a Girl was good, but Don't Speak was and is still awesome. I dug it out again a few months back for the first time in years (on a mix-CD for the car, ironically); I'd forgotten how good it is.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I dig Don't Speak, baby. Just surprised that it's their most famous.