Wednesday, December 05, 2001

A few weeks ago at the Retro Bar Retroteasers Pop Quiz, Simon Hobart (the promoter of Popstarz) was in attendance. Foolishly, he told the manager Wendy that he had been in a band in the 80s. "They were called Red Lipstick, but with a funny spelling." Wendy asked me to see if I could find out anything about them on the internet. I love a challenge, so off I went...

Simon was obviously none too proud of the band, as none of the online biographies of him mentioned it. I changed tack and started searching for the band by name - a funny spelling? How about Red Lipstique? Bingo! There was indeed an 80s band called Red Lipstique - they had released three singles: Drac's Back, Shame Shame Shame and Oskar Wilde.

So off I went to gemm.com. Gemm is " the world's largest music catalog - 13 million items from more than 4,000 sellers". It allows you to search the databases of record shops all over the world. If Gemm can't find what you're looking for, no-one can.

I found it all right. Last night I presented Wendy with copies of two Red Lipstique singles. She was ecstatic - so ecstatic that she bought us a bottle of champagne. The champagne was consumed along with our usual quota of beer, which may help to explain my headache.

It doesn't help to explain how we won, however. I'll leave that to Davo.

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