(Top 50 Countdown!!!) 31. The Tams - "Hey Girl Don't Bother Me"

I don’t know anything about this group, and I don’t want to know, so don’t tell me. It just seems to exist out of nowhere, half soul and half bubblegum. If there’s a whole genre of records like this well, I’m afraid to look, cos I do have other things to do, and I can’t just spend all day every day drowning in seas of unknown half-soul-half-bubblegum discographies. So it’s like ‘What? I don’t understand… what is this? Why? Who? When?’, and that kinda mystery is pretty intoxicating. It’s like clouds: they look great (we’re talking about fluffy nice ones here, not big everywhere-grey ones) but you can’t hold them. This one was pretty much always a favourite in the Pooh Sticks house, right from “Formula One Generation” anyway, to the very end. It has one of the very most beautiful middle-8’s, don’t you think? Plus, it’s got some of that teen-femme-fatale thing going on, like in “Young Girl” by The Union Gap, and that’s always good in a pop record, so I’m told. Death, guitars and girls, apparently. Look, you learn to roll with it.

"Think Bubble" is an album (LP only) of 1995 demos for an unreleased Pooh Sticks album.
See 'About Me' for details.