The 80s-90s Lost Classics Rate - Goodbye Wes! :'-(

Remorque

Remorque

He/Him
As someone who's gone skiing/snowboarding for about twenty years straight and we were by no means rich when I was a kid, let me put that out there immediately, I can safely say that there's an even balance between people who like to dance atop a table or two when hearing it and people who flee the place as soon as that chant begins.

The song's absolutely atrocious and the song received one of my lowest scores, but the general public were sold, seaux...

As for the rest of the songs you posted, I already hated Hey Baby when I first heard it on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and as for Ein Stern, the Belgians most definitely stay winning as Christoff has released his version to huge commercial success in the Benelux, but the biggest success story in Belgium has to be when Stan Van Samang covered the song in Dutch for a series called Liefde voor Muziek and broke commercial records with it.


 
D

Deleted member 26234

Good evening! It's me again. A German song again! But which?





































#63





The Kelly Family – An Angel

Picked By: @Filippa
Credentials: Platinum in Austria, 3x Gold in Germany (800.000 copies); #1 in Austria, #2 in Germany and Switzerland, #5 in Ireland
Average Score: 5.8432
Highest Score: 8.75 @If You Go
Lowest Score: 2 @jtm

It’s about family business. But we’re not talking about an average family, we’re talking about the Kelly Family: father, mother and 15 kids? And it’s a family with many talents, but also issues. The father rejected the usual lifestyle, so the kids were homeschooled and lived without tv, radio or even a phone. Their mother died at the age of 36 (her youngest son Angelo was just 11 months old) of breast cancer (she rejected a chemotherapy because she was pregnant). The father was restless, so they moved from country to country (Spain, Austria, Ireland, Germany, France …) and worse he was addicted (alcohol). There were accusations of abuse of course because the kids had no proper school education and that he forced them into the music business.

They were in the music business from the 70s, but their most successful time was in the 90s and started with “An Angel”. Paddy wrote the song for his mother at the age of 15. Paddy and Angelo, the two lead singers, became the idols of a whole generation of little girls. They then released five more or less successful albums ‘till 2004. But the success was too much. Drugs, alcohol, differences, depressions and suicide attempts marked their life. Paddy, for example, retrieved into a monastery in 2004 before he returned as solo act in 2011. Finally, some of them reunited in 2017 and make music again together and solo.


What did PopJustice think?

@Sprockrooster (7,0): I adore Flip A Coin a lot. This is not entirely it for me.

@Epic Chocolat (4): They sound interesting? Not my thing

@pop3blow2 (8.7): Close to crossing some intangible line for me… but it straddles the line well enough. The female vocal parts feel very 1970s, to me. even though this song is from the 90s. What a bizarre song.

@Phonetics Girl (7.5): The young boy has a cute voice.

@daninternational (6): Ah I love their Eurovision attempt, it's so beautiful. I find the rest of their stuff a bit too cheesy, and I can't escape the creepy home-schooled feel of them. A very German phenomenon.

@WowWowWowWow (3): Oh LORD. It's like a children's choir come to life. No.

@DominoDancing (6): The green screen effects in the video, good god. These whiny, melodramatic songs being big hits in Germany is still a kii 25 years later.

@jtm (2): Words can‘t describe how much I hate this. The whole Amish children singing somewhat religious songs is a giant no go for me

@Penguin (5): Nice song, but the struggle vocals aren’t.

@Filippa (5): They can sing, it’s not a bad song, but still?

@MilesAngel (5): This is well produced but this type of sentimental ballad just isn't for me.

@berserkboi (5.0): Very MOR but the melody is quite pretty!




I close with some songs:

The Kelly Family – An Angel (written by Paddy)


The Kelly Family - I Can’t Help Myself (written by Angelo, now after his puberty vocal change)


The Kelly Family Comeback – “Who’ll Come With Me” (John on lead vocals) and “Nanana” (Jimmy on lead vocals) (2017)


Michael Patrick Kelly (Paddy) – Beautiful Madness, solo, 2020


Angelo Kelly & Family – Stay With Me (2020, Angelo with his wife Kira and their kids)



And if you like:
Maite Kelly, Roland Kaiser – Warum hast du nicht nein gesagt (2014)
https://youtu.be/BNHamTwxJ6Q
 
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berserkboi

berserkboi

He/Him
Great job @Filippa!! Do you all notice the jump in the average score? Poor Dorothée and DJ Otzi were always trailing by about 15-20 points behind the rest of the songs. A veritable:

tenor.gif


Bottom 2!
 
Remorque

Remorque

He/Him
I always got an icky feeling when it comes to The Kelly Family, so I never actually got into them. An Angel sounds nice, but the choir-like feel and teen vocals do absolutely nothing for me.

They had a massive hit over here with the aforementioned I Can’t Help Myself and even though Fell in Love with an Alien did just as well, they fell off the face off the earth quickly after.

Still, Alien’s a bop.
 
Maki

Maki

This is not the song I expected to leave at this point, but I'm happy it did.

I gave "An Angel" a 5.5 (which was generous), as it's that rare combination of boring and annoying. The lyrics are cringey, too. But there some nice moments, so I didn't want to tank it.

The only song of theirs I was familiar with before this rate is "Fell in Love with an Alien" and I agree with @Remorque that it's a great song. Miles better than "An Angel".
 
D

Deleted member 26234

The Kelly Family siblings are all good musicians. I find it quite impressing that they wrote their own music and how young they were when they did so. I only knew An Angel and I Can't Help Myself, these were their biggest hits in Austria. I listened to a few songs today and I do like the new song by Paddy and I like Kira's voice.

Here's @Sprockrooster 's favourite. I agree with him, that's the best I've heard from them so far:

 
DominoDancing

DominoDancing

Remorque said:
I always got an icky feeling when it comes to The Kelly Family, so I never actually got into them. An Angel sounds nice, but the choir-like feel and teen vocals do absolutely nothing for me.

They had a massive hit over here with the aforementioned I Can’t Help Myself and even though Fell in Love with an Alien did just as well, they fell off the face off the earth quickly after.

Still, Alien’s a bop.
Click to expand...

Ddddd not this song being actually quite nice? Not me discovering a good Kelly Family song 25 years after my Bravo reading phase?
 
daninternational

daninternational

he/him
Great and informative write-up!! There's a lot worse left in (mainly French stuff) but also makes sense

This is their Eurovision attempt, which came 4th in Germany's pre-selection in 2002.
Still listen to this regularly. It's basically just Maite, who has some great recentish schlager bops too.

And the music vid was obviously the inspiration for "Jess Glynne Brits performance"



For the schlager fans this is her biggest bop:
 
TrendyMüller

TrendyMüller

I think I wrote this before here somewhere on the forum.
Before The Kelly´s hit it big, they would tour German shopping streets with their red bus. Apparantly they all lived in there like in a clown car. They would park the thing on some square, hop out, sing, sell whatever they had to sell, and then they would drive off to the next place.
My best friend at the time was working on the second floor in a punk/goth boutique/record store that was located right above the square where they did their little show.
I was hanging out there quite often and that day we would yank open the windows (we had to remove the fake(?) spiderwebs and bones first), put up some speakers facing outwards and played Cocteau Twins and Virgin Prunes at earsplitting volume while throwing rolls of toilet paper down on the gathered crowd. I´m not proud of this, but I would do it again.
 
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