A Good Heart by Feargal Sharkey

This cracking single was released by Feargal Sharkey in September 1985.  This was the third single by Feargal, who is also well known as the lead singer of the band The Undertones.  The single was a big success and hit the UK number one spot.  I'll start off now by saying I think it is one of the top 10 songs of 1985 and is close to a perfect pop song.

The song was written by singer/songwriter Maria Mckee, herself no stranger to the charts and is all about her failed relationship with Benmont Tench, the keyboard player from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.  It was produced by Dave Stewart from The Eurithmics and had Boy George on backing vocals, so quite a celebrity hit!

I hear a lot of stories, I suppose they could be true

All about love and what it can do to you

Highest risk of striking out, the risk of getting hurt

And still I have so much to learn

I know 'cause I think about it all the time

I know that real love is quite a price 

 So here we go, here is the original video, followed up by Maria McKees version from 2007.

  

Weird Science (the movie)

This classic 1985 John Hughes movie was released on 6 August 1985.  Can't believe it is 3 years since we lost John and it seems that this is a good month to be talking about this movie.

The movie starred a John Hughes favourite, Anthony Michael Hall, who also starred in Hughes movies The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles and in this movie too he carries on that brilliant nerd character he created.  The movie also starred Ilan Mitchell-Smith and Kelly Le Brock as well as Bill Paxton and Robert Downey Jr.

The plot of the movie is straight out of a boys dream - two nerds who cannot get a real girlfriend decide to create their perfect woman by loading pictures of various attributes into their computer (a Memotech MTX if you are interested).  Running out of computer capacity they hack into a Government Website (Hello, Wargames, Ferris Bueller!!) and connect a barbie doll up to the computer!  A fortuitous lightning strike at the precise moment that they hit the enter key resulted in their perfect woman being created, played by Kelly LeBrock, who the boys name Lisa!  Lisa also has a certain number of special powers.

She helps the boys smarten up their act and, as soon as they get real girlfriends, Lisa disappears in a puff of smoke, only to reappear in the Epilogue as a sexy gym teacher.

The movie is a great Hughes movies, though not as great as some others (not that this is hard).  I always thought it struggled to carry on the opening 30 or so minutes throughout the movie, but it's still a classic Hughes movie.

The soundtrack was good, and featured OMD, Kim Wilde and Oingo Boingo with the title song.

There was a TV series from 1994 to 1998 starring Vanessa Angel in the Lisa role.  Check out Vanessa in the fantastic Farrelly brothers Kingpin!

Why not grab a copy of this 1985 classic and enjoy a little LeBrock just like the guys did!