#69 ‘Stay’ by Oingo Boingo (24 June)

Album: Dead Man’s Party, 1985

Justification: These days, if Oingo Boingo are mentioned at all, it’s normally in the context of That Band What Danny Elfman Was In Before He Did All Those Tim Burton Scores And The Simpsons Theme And Stuff. Which seems a bit unfair for a band Elfman led from 1976 to its dissolution in 1995. Y’know, that’s pretty serious.

In most of the world they’re best known for ‘Weird Science’, but in Australia their biggest hit was this creepily memorable song, thanks to an inexplicable love for it among the nation’s morning FM DJs. It wasn’t, as far as I’m aware, that big a splash elsewhere but it did very well in Australia – and especially South Australia, due pretty much entirely to SAFM’s apparent policy of playing it every five minutes. And dammit, it worked: I still adore it to this day, even though it wasn’t until I got a delay pedal that I worked out how to play that riff (see also: the keyboard line in Models’ ‘I Hear Motion’).

The album from whence it comes is also their most comprehensive work: ‘Just Another Day’, ‘No-one Lives Forever’, ‘Weird Science’ and of course ‘Dead Man’s Party’. Awesome.