Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Pop quiz at the Retro Bar last night, and we finally broke our unlucky streak of second places. Yes, we won. Admittedly, this was largely because our main competition - the Readers Wifes - weren't in. But, then again, we were a man short, as Dave was too shagged-out to make it. So it was up to us hardier stalwarts, me, Jonathan and "the-lovely-Darren-TM" to represent the side. Ian was there too, as was Darren's boyfriend Jim, but - well - let's just say we didn't feel we were breaking the Retro Bar rules which allow four members per team...

Once again, we destroyed any street cred we may have had by getting through the easy listening section without any bother [Bobbie Gentry, Sacha Distel and Roger Miller]. We had great fun with the "I'll name that tune in one" round, spotting Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Jocelyn Brown's Somebody's Else's Guy from just the first note. Unfortunately, we confused En Vogue's My Lovin' with their Hold On.

We didn't do too badly in the indie round, which comprised three Radiohead-soundalikes. We recognised Muse, and assumed Starsailor must be in there too, so put them for both of the remaining questions. One was right, the other was Elbow [who??]. We spotted the connection between The All Seeing I's Walk Like A Panther and The Lorraine Bowen Experience's Julie Christie, even if we didn't know that the third part of the question was Lou Christie.

Next came the "what happened next" round, where we had to complete the ten words that come after "Like a rhinestone cowboy". We knew "riding out on a horse", and we knew "a star-spangled rodeo", but the conjunction caused major dissent - was it "in", "at" or "like"? We plumped for "at". It was "in".

We came a bit of a cropper on the covers round - we recognised some grungey version of Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down Again but - frustratingly - no matter how much I racked my brain, examined the tip of my tongue and beat my head against the wall, we didn't get the thrash cover of Alphaville's Big In Japan.

Our final score: 17-and-a-half, reduced to 17 after being docked half a point for neglecting to include the final "Again" on the Depeche Mode track. Luckily, there were no real challengers, so no resulting tie-break this week. Unluckily however, we didn't win the money. Instead, we won a fitting prize - a huge book of..... pop quizzes.

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