Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth, Part 3

I had a weird experience with this song during, if I remember correctly, the Christmas break from my first year of college. Someone at a party made a joke about Kajagoogoo. I thought about it for a few seconds, then asked "What was there song?" Suddenly, there was silence. Nobody could remember. For the better part of a week, we kept asking everyone we knew, and our lacuna spread like a virus to everyone we asked. We could all remember that there was a band called Kajagoogoo, that the singer had funny hair, that they sounded vaguely like Duran Duran. We could all picture their video in our heads. But none of us could remember the name of the song, or how it went. I can't remember who finally solved the mystery, but once we heard the name, it all came back to us.



I had an even weirder experience wtih this song when I was 18. I had heard the Buzzcocks' collection Singles Going Steady plenty of times, although I didn't own a copy. Some of the songs stuck in my mind, some didn't. I guess this one didn't, but at some point the melody appeared in my head. It was like a fuzzy memory, and I couldn't identify the song. Mostly, I could hear the one part where he says "I know that it's OK, OK." The way he clenches his voice on that line reminded me of Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes, so I went back and listened to every track on every Violent Femmes album (there were only three at the time), but couldn't find it. Then I thought it might be The Cure's "Close to You" (same beat, pretty much). Listened to it, nope, that's not it. It was starting to fade in my memory. The chorus was getting mixed up with Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." Eventually, I just gave up. Then, last year, I was listening to some Buzzcocks CD's from the library, and there it was! The song that had been stuck in my head for 20 years!