song of the week 20: kane gang - the closest thing to heaven

In its time the Newcastle-based Kitchenware record label has been responsible for some great music. I've waxed lyrical elsewhere about the songwriting genius of Paddy McAloon and his tragically now defunct Prefab Sprout. Round about the time when the Sprouts were being conscripted, fellow North-Easterner Martin Stephenson (these days on a seemingly unending tour of undersized UK venues) signed to the label with his band the Daintees, soon afterwards releasing the classic 1986 Boat to Bolivia album. Equally the post-Microdisney work of Cathal Coughlan--first in the guise of Fatima Mansions with their "Keep Music Evil" manifesto, then latterly under his own moniker--was also foisted on an unsuspecting public by the Newcastle label. All good stuff.

This week's musical gem is a laid-back blue-eyed soul offering from the Kane Gang, another band from the Kitchenware stable. They had a sizeable UK hit with this single from their 1985 album The Bad and Lowdown World of the Kane Gang. All these years later there's little trace of them on the new-fangled internet--their website kanegang.com remains sadly unconstructed--so it seems unlikely that they're planning a reunion Greatest Hits tour soon. As ever, though, Wikipedia lunges in where other chroniclers of obscure pop fear to tread. Can you believe their startling claim that it was the Kane Gang who performed the music for the "Ooh Gary Davies" jingle for the perma-tanned erstwhile Radio One DJ?

How did we even get through the day before Wikipedia * existed?



* Davies also gets a ridiculously long Wikipedia entry to himself, but this discussion on the Word Magazine website seems more worthy of a link.