Then there was Actually...a critic simply put two lines in his column: If you like pop music then it never gets better than this...if you don't like, well you still have your chances.
But what made PSB one of the greatest (at least here) was Always on my mind in both favourable and infavourable terms. We, the students, were cut into two like the Red Sea: A huge majority was defending and drooling how on earth these two guys imbued their lavish sound to this blatant and sleep-inducing Elvis song and a not-so-small group of "rock fellows" was bashing them whenever they had the chance. Whatever the consequences, Always on my mind was the number one disco trick that year in college parties, stretching its life even to the summer resorts and many people who dismissed Actually simply couldn't stand more; that's the reason why Kent, EMI's then Turkish agent did not quite know how to cope with the ever-rising demand and imported the record from abroad- quite unusual then. Press coverage was huge, even a high brow politics magazine which simply hated mainstream pop commented that "they were one of the best things to come out of England since the Beatles".
Heart somehow flew below the radar of Turkish youth (rather shadowed by the ever-green Always on my mind) but the Domino dancing and the Introspective were simply the culmination of PSB Love- Domino dancing's video was a justified reason for missing the courses and 38 classmates out of 42 in my class had the Introspective- from a strange point of view, Introspective is roughly among the five biggest selling albums in 80's here together with Madonna's True Blue, Wham's Make it Big, Michael Jackson's Bad and Def Leppard's Hysteria. It was imperative to buy it and you were dismissed as an out of fashion person if you were incapable of commenting on its tracks.
I remember everyone's expectations were very very high when first So Hard and then Behaviour were released- everyone quite struggled to listen to and watch the So Hard video-but unfortunately both fell short of meeting them and were somehow big disappointments, particularly Behaviour. Yes, it sold full of buckets, quite contrary to its worldwide sales, but it was quickly taken out of stereos and shelved. "Where the Streets" again fired up some hot debates, pro and cons both, and Discography was always labelled as a must-have but the public had moved on.
Go West and Very somehow stirred the public again-but it was a joke when compared with 1987-1988 and Very was the first album even fanatics like me felt that it was a forced and calculated product just to get to the top of charts again and wipe away the laziness of Behaviour. And that's the end of story...
And the sweet and bitter nostalgia makes one forget to shut up..
