A small puff

Ooops! here we go for a slight boost in Malcolm’s derisory stat-porn (© either Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes — who cares, anyway?).

For why?

There’s a BBC page on 20 of your songs that changed the world, of which perhaps half-a-dozen get the Malcolmian seal of approval.

Furthermore, Nena’s one-hit wonder, 99 Luftballons is in the list. Quite properly:

Europop doesn’t come much better. Not that there’s huge competition in that category.

Nearer home:

Malcolm worked that one into a rumination on a DARPA experiment and a trip to the Sloany Pony in Parsons Green. Quite which aspect there keeps pulling in the gongoozlers he doesn’t know: it remains, however, one of the 1678 (officially) posts on Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service that still drags ’em in.

Here’s another, older but perhaps better:

A week ago the Pert Young Piece dragged the Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the man himself to Berlin’s Warschauer Strasse S-Bahn station. From there down to Mühlenstrasse, to walk the mile long East End Gallery — the well-graffitied remaining stretch of the Wall. Damn cold; but not to be missed.

The Wall has been expunged for most of it length — though a keen eye tells the lingering architectural and other differences between the old East and West. On tatty, crappy Warschauer Strasse there can be no doubt.

Which brings us to another song that should have changed the world. Alas, back in 1962 (when Wayne Shaklin gave it to his wife Toni Fisher) we’d be waiting over half-a-century for the abomination to be ripped down: