The next time you're down the local boozer with your mates and there's an uncomfortable lull in the conversation,[http://rockthestock.biz/wholetones-christmas-cd-review/ Wholetones Christmas Review] consider striking up a discussion based on the following question - which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that's passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages - who is the best footballer never to have played in the World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.
Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics' short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also rules out the likes of New York's Suicide and David Thomas' experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.
Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, The Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here,[http://quantumvisionsystemreview.com/magnifier-engine-system-review/ http://quantumvisionsystemreview.com/magnifier-engine-system-review/] or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly "you ain't heard nothing yet" and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.