Longread about Pump Up The Volume by MARRS - does this exist?

Agreed Dan, I was stunned that those two songs haven't been covered, or used on adverts/films (unless they have). I think what got me was seeing this live performance of Moon Is Blue, packed festival crowd, going nuts, then a decade later almost totally forgotten, unlike say The Smiths, Echo Bunnymen, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IOUJa7bv4A

Stirmonster, I think they are in those of a certain vintage but I'd say under 40s don't have a clue, in the main. This 'Baby I Love You So' is great. Are there other songs I'm missing? Love how Theme is so wildly different to Arena, and PUTV something else entirely. Martyn Young deserves much more acclaim than he has, guy was a stone-cold genius.

You should probably add Tarantula to your list of their great songs

packed festival crowd, going nuts,

tbf this is a TV audience who have will have been encouraged to react wildly before the taping, and before each act's mimed performance

Ah ok, were Colourbox not much of a draw back then? I know 'Theme...' was a club hit, round my way at least, but that's a few years later than that clip.

Does baffle me that the Cocteau Twins, for example, had a constant low buzz of hype all through the past decades, but Colourbox fell off the map, mediawise, in the early 90s.

You should probably add Tarantula to your list of their great songs

and the cover by This Mortal Coil.

as well as

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp8dMveAYZc

and on a more PUTV tip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4UasSnTKWE

Ian did mention Theme tbf, but the version on the 12" that segues out of Philip Glass is The One imo.

Searched "music convoy," from the logos on the truck, and it turns out to be a German TV show with typically one song each by four bands per episode. Including other big-time hitmakers like Troy Tate, Slickaphonics, David Knopfler and Götz Alsmann & The Sentimental Pounders. Presumably each episode saw the truck parked in a different German street.

Ha, what?! Honestly thought you'd made "Götz Alsmann & The Sentimental Pounders" up. Looks like a second stage at Glastonbury or something, not... that.

How big actually were Colourbox in the mid-80s? I have no clue at all. Like, where would they place on a festival line-up compared to Bunnymen, Ride, Sonic Youth, Smiths, etc

In truth not very big outside indie circles. No chart singles and album only made #67.

Which makes the runaway success of PUTV even more astonishing.

Stirmonster, I think they are in those of a certain vintage but I'd say under 40s don't have a clue, in the main.

i guess this is true.

'The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme" was MASSIVE at student discos when i was a student so i feel they would probably have been a bigger festival draw than one might imagine.

I don't think the runaway success of PUTV was really related to Colourbox at all. The vast majority of people who bought it probably had never heard of them and never heard of them afterwards either. i think it was astonishing it was such a big hit but it was really about the timing of when it came out and an audience for that kind of record had been building and building, it's just that nobody really knew that until PUTV was released.