2. Cyndi LauperShe’s So Unusual
[Starts playing ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’] I had to pick a pop record from the 80s that I genuinely loved and there are two that stuck with me: True Blue by Madonna, which I absolutely adored as a youth, and Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual which I must have fucking burnt the cassette out on my Walkman playing. Cyndi wins because it has ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ on it which is, to my mind, possibly the best song of the 1980s. It’s become utterly fucking timeless, I don’t know a single person that doesn’t like that song and if I did I wouldn’t fucking trust them. She seemed very otherworldly, like Madonna did too, these bizarre creatures that were around when I was a boy. My mum bought the album on cassette and she never saw it again once she did. The album itself is fantastic; the first song, ‘Money Changes Everything’ is amazing; obviously ‘Time After Time’ is a classic and she did a Prince cover too, ‘When You Were Mine’.
It’s an interesting record to find out more about as I got older, I didn’t know this [‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’] was a cover version. It was written by a man [Robert Hazard] and he did it with his band. The original intention of the song was about this young guy who’s frustrated because his girlfriend wants to go out all the time and enjoy herself, then Cyndi Lauper took it – there’s an early demo of her doing it that was more stylistically similar to the original, that sort of new wave/punk sound – then she took it to another producer and she did something fucking phenomenal with it. She took a song about a guy being miserable and jealous because his girlfriend is not wanting to spend time with him and made it into this feminist anthem. I actually think it might be the best pop single I’ve ever heard short, possibly, of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ which I think is without a doubt the best and most important record of the 90s, but I’ll give the 80s to Cyndi and possibly the 90s to Pulp.
