Wednesday, August 22, 2001

We didn't have high hopes for last night's Retro Bar pop quiz. Darren couldn't make it, and when Jonathan phoned me to say he wasn't well enough to attend, I almost cancelled too. But then I got a text message from Shaun saying he was coming, and I figured we might as well go along for a laugh. Ian and Marcus joined us, and we called ourselves No Darren, No Jonathan, No Chance. How wrong we were...
For questions one to four, we had to name the eight popsters pictured. [Click on the thumbnail to open a larger version of the picture in a new window.] How many can you get?
The next three questions formed the "whistling round". We managed to recognise Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy, Roxy Music's Jealous Guy and Goldfrapp's Lovely Head from their whisting bits.

Next up they played Summer Holiday, Bohemian Rhapsody, Hi Ho Silver Lining and Teenage Dirtbag. We failed to name the product which uses those songs in its TV ad. Can you?

The following three questions proved how little we knew about Latino music. We recognised Gypsy Kings, Los Del Rio and Arrow, but failed to spot the Gibson Brothers, Champs and Booker T and the MGs. A quick call to Darren after the quiz proved that he would have got them without any hesitation.

Our favourite round was next. See if you can spot the connection between Soul II Soul's Keep On Movin', the opening bars of the Toy Dolls' number one hit, and Turn On The Light, the latest single by a young female popstar.

For the following question, we identified Hear'Say, Westlife and N*Sync, and correctly added up the number of members of each band to get a total of fifteen.

The next three songs were all from old films. Ian knew that Put The Blame On Mame was from "Gilda", and we also correctly identified songs from "Easter Parade" and "Gigi".

The 'What Happens Next' round gave us our traditional opportunity to quibble with the judges. We were played a snatch of the Steppenwolf hit Born To Be Wild, and had to supply the 16 words which follow "like a true nature's child". We got two words slightly wrong, and scored a half-point.

The Suede album played next gave us no problems: "Head Music". Marcus recognised Let Me Blow Ya Mind by Eve featuring Gwen Stefani. Unfortunately, we thought MOP featuring Busta Rhymes was Bad Boys featuring Eminem. The funniest moment of the night was Shaun's Freudian slip when talking to the huge-breasted woman at the bar: "of course, you're right, it is Busty Rhymes!" The Fun Lovin' Criminals gave us no problem with their new single Bump [and a patronising load of old shit is, too].

We even got the year right for a change. Luckily I remember Debbie Harry's Backfired far too well, and didn't need to hear Ultravox's All Stood Still and, um, something else, to know it was 1981.

We ended the quiz on 18 out of 22. The atmosphere was tense, as it was Big Money night. All the teams who only come along when the stakes are high were there, including the surly bloke in the football shirt who glowered at us each time we got an answer right. We knew we'd done well, but had we done well enough? Yes! The big money was ours, all £121 of it. Naturally, we went out to celebrate, and called Jonathan and Darren immediately to gloat share our news.

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