Rate Your Music score: 3.64 out of 5!
This bouncy record by this San Francisco band is exactly the sort of mid-1980s song that got me interested in lost hits in the first place. It was just a big enough hit that it got a few spins on pop radio, but just minor enough that stations stopped playing it for good after only a few weeks. Most such tracks - like this one - fall into the category of new wave, but perhaps that's because it was the mid-'80s.
Romeo Void's fine single is particularly qualified for this blog because it peaked during a brief window after which life has never been able to recover its former glory. The late 2010s came close in some ways - but just not musically.
It helps that the mid-'80s were a good time for music - even by '80s standards. It beats the ballad-heavy early '80s and the often insufferably stale late '80s. I'm as fond of music from 1983-85 as I am of the great music of 1978-79.
Strangely, I don't ever remember seeing the "A Girl In Trouble" video back in the '80s. However, I seem to recall the instrumental break in the middle being used in an unlikely venue: Not Necessarily The News. I'm pretty sure this show once had a segment in which "A Girl In Trouble" served as the bed music.
Probably my favorite NNTN segment though was a parody of the Civil War Chess Set commercial that used different kinds of cheese as chess pieces, and they leaked all over the board. NNTN also once had a segment called "Senator Hogg" - a reference to Boss Hogg - that used footage of Jesse Helms.
Subscribing to a premium cable channel was a temporary thing. I don't know how much longer we had HBO, but we weren't made of money, and I don't remember ever seeing HBO much after the mid-'80s.
