Sunday shorts: Pop Art Poem

Technically this is six or seven seconds too long to qualify as a Sunday Short, but sod it, my gaff, my rules.

I remember the first time I heard this so vivdly. It was given away as a bright yellow cover-mounted flexi-disc with the short-lived Flexipop magazine back in February 1981. My brother bought that (I wonder if he still has it?) and played it repeatedly on the big old wood-veneer music centre that sat in one corner of the living room. Me, not yet eleven, was gobsmacked. I taped it, of course (home taping didn't kill music after all), together with the second track (a rough demo of Boy About Town) and in the years that followed I put it on so many mix-tapes, whenever and wherever I had a gap to fill at the end of a side that was too short for a "normal" song. I think I also liked having a rare track to hand, maybe something that my mates hadn't heard.

Of course Pop Art Poem would eventually surface on mop-up collection Extras in April 1992, and then my rarity trump card was gone. To me, though, this still sounds great.