Hello, I’m Nick and I’m an unashamed Hall & Oates-aholic.
Daryl Hall & John Oates are in my eyes the top of the pops, the best of the best- or what the French call “crème de la crème”. If they were a car, they’d be in the F1, if they were a plane they’d be concorde. And, don’t get me started on that moustache. That is godly, equalled only by Selleck himself.
It all started for me with (500) Days of Summer, which I’m unashamed to say is one of the best rom-coms out there. Although it protests to not be a “love story”, my teenage self nevertheless fell in love with it. It showed love as a raw entity, something that isn’t always both ways, something that can give and take away in equal measure.
The underlying current was hope and belief in “love” as a concept, something that can be found. The film portrayed it through the main character Tom, who naively falls in love with Summer, a girl who holds her cards close to her chest, repeatedly saying to him that she doesn’t want anything serious.
As you can probably tell from that simple synopsis, the end result of the relationship is a car crash laid out to the viewer at the very beginning. However, one of the most iconic scenes from the film is a moment where Tom asks Summer for a date and she says yes. In response, he runs off into the closest LA park and performs a Disney style flash mob dance, swaying and flailing around like the drunk-in-love man he is.
The soundtrack to this wonderful scene is of course ‘You Make My Dreams’, a pop tune so good it can literally be used to symbolise love.
From here it’s only up. ‘Maneater’, ‘Private Eyes’, ‘Rich Girl’ all complete game-changers for the genre. They could hit a ballad on its head and still keep your white shoes tapping under neon lights in the eighties- and beyond. These guys had shoulder pads for fuck sake, two incredible mullets and a synth in each holster, what could they possibly do wrong. Nothing. They could do nothing wrong. They were, and are, legends of pop, Though nearly always forgotten in people’s ‘Best of’ lists, they hold a sacred place in mine between my other guilty pleasures, Coldplay and Chris Isaak… maybe I’ll tell you about them another time… maybe not.
Listen to Hall & Oates on Spotify and Apple Music.
