Mark Pentleton

Back in 1985, following BandAid’s Do they know it’s Christmas project in the UK, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wrote this song to be performed by a ’supergroup’ featuring many of the biggest recording artists in the US at the time including Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper and Bruce Springsteen. Since its [...]

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Tonight I decided to play Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu from his 1985 Requiem Mass. It was dedicated to his father who died in 1982 and the recording featured his then-wife Sarah Brightman and Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, conducted by Lorin Maazel.

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When choosing a Billy Joel song for Celeste the other day I recorded Leave a tender moment alone as well as An innocent man. Leave a tender moment first appeared on the 1984 album An Innocent Man and was subsequently released as a single. In a move virtually unheard of today, the song didn’t have [...]

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Today’s song is Billy Joel’s 1983 classic An Innocent Man and it was specially requested by Celeste Teenan who celebrates her birthday today. Happy birthday, Celeste! Hope you have a lovely day and that you enjoy the song.

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Today’s song is taken from the musical Chess. When Benny and Björn were writing the musical, Björn would add lyrics to Benny’s music to help give the song more rhythm and meaning. They then sent their “demos” to Tim Rice who wrote the final version of the lyrics. Heaven help my heart was actually recorded [...]

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Today’s song is the 1987 Diane Warren and Albert Hammond classic Nothing’s gonna stop us now, performed by Starship and used as the theme song of the film Mannequin. It made #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK charts, and rightly so in my opinion!

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This happy song has a bit of a sad story. Roy Orbison recorded You Got It in 1988 and it was released on the Mystery Girl album in 1989, a few months after his death in December 1988 from a heart attack. It reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Adult [...]

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Today’s song is the 1984 power ballad by REO Speedwagon, and was performed by the band in the 1985 Live Aid concert. It’s been used in many TV shows and films, most recently sung by Finn in Glee.

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I’m running a bit late with today’s song after almost two weeks of timely publication, but that’s because we’re just back from a family holiday in France and Belgium and the past two weeks’ songs were all preloaded! Fortunately, everything went according to plan and I hope you’ve all enjoyed the recent songs. It was [...]

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Today’s song is the ballad from the 1980 Abba album Super Trouper. It’s always been one of my favourite Abba songs, and I remember playing this often while my wife was expecting our first son. It was released as a single in South America and South Africa, but elsewhere it featured only as an album [...]

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This song was written by James Horner, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for the 1986 animated film An American Tail. The song deals with the bond between two siblings and their desire to see each other again after being separated. The Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram version of the song went to #2 in the [...]

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Today’s song comes from the second act of the musical Phantom of the Opera and is sung as a duet in counterpoint by the Phantom and Christine. It comes just before the moment in the musical when the Phantom’s disfigured face is revealed.

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Returning to Latin America today after the Theme from The Mission on Saturday, today’s song is a bit of a rarity. It’s taken from the Misa Campesina Nicaraguense, the Nicaraguan Peasants’ Mass by Carlos Mejía Godoy, which combined Nicaraguan folk music and Liberation Theology. I first came across this piece of music when studying Latin [...]

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We’re staying with an Italian theme today, but I don’t know very much about this song! It was performed in the 1989 Festival di San Remo, the Italian song contest, and I remembered it from a CD I bought of that year’s festival when I was working as a language assistant in Menton, France, just [...]

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In my opinion this song is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. It dates from 1983, although it wasn’t released until six years later on Billy Joel’s Stormfront album. It’s said to tell the tale of the relationship between Billy Joel and the model Elle Macpherson, a relationship which the musician knew would [...]

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Today’s song is one of the many underrated Abba songs, Cassandra. It was the b-side to the 1982 single The Day Before You Came, and I think the story related in this song was a precursor of the Björn and Benny’s future musical theatre work (Chess and Kristina från Duvemåla). While the lyrics seem to [...]

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Thirty years ago today the recording of this Abba classic (and one of my favourite Abba songs) began in the Polar Music Studios in Stockholm. At this stage it was called The Story of My Life and no particular musical style had been identified during the recording session. Benny and Björn took the recordings home [...]

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There was something about Eurovision in the 1980s – it was probably when I first got interested in the contest and its linguistic and musical “exoticism”, but there’s definitely something about some of the big songs from the 80s, including this classic from Johnny Logan with which he won his second Eurovision (previously with What’s Another [...]

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Day two of our Eurovision countdown and we’re going back to 1988 with Lara Fabian’s Croire, representing Luxembourg that year. The song ended up in 4th place – the winning song in 1988 was Céline Dion’s Ne partez sans moi.

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It’s Eurovision week, so that means only one thing – cheesy tunes from me for at least the next six days! The 2010 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Oslo on Saturday evening, and until then we’ll be reliving some classic ballads from the past, starting today with Nicole’s winning song from 1982, Ein [...]

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