I never actually owned any of yesterday’s trio, but I did buy a fairly second-rate compilation called “The Hit Pack”, which was released the same year. It’s a wildly varied assortment, with everything from Groove Is In The Heart to Fog On The Tyne. Well, perhaps not everything, but those are the opening and closing tracks. The filler in the Deee-Lite and Gazza sandwich is made up of songs that mostly remind you of other stuff you’d rather be listening to, as represented by Fantasy (the Black Box song that’s not Ride On Time), Mary Had A Little Boy (the Snap! song that’s not Rhythm Is A Dancer) and Thieves In The Temple (the Prince song that’s not any of his good ones).

Thrown into this tepid pool is a sequence of three tracks near the end of side 1 that deserved better. The third is Good Morning Britain by Aztec Camera, holding down the middle is 808 State’s Cubik, and leading those two out is Then by The Charlatans, a song that made me go all baggy at the knees and sent me shuffling down the indie path.

It also sent me shuffling back to Woolies to return “The Hit Pack”. History does not recall (or has chosen to forget) what I replaced it with…