It really is time that I got round to sharing my thoughts on this one. The idea to do a piece on this tune occurred to me in the aftermath of writing the Shane MacGowan item back in December. If you recall that piece, you’ll be aware that part of the story was about my liking of music that some of my less enlightened peers did not. This has been a pretty constant theme throughout my life, hence the existence of this series.
I can’t recall where I first heard what was the only song by Immaculate Fools that I knew for many years, other than the B-side. I’m guessing it was the juke box in the common room at my college. It generally had a smattering of current hits, but there were always the odd one or two which someone somewhere thought would have been hits by the next time they rocked up to change the records. I remember putting my money in said juke box rather a lot during the early part of 1985, as well as the accompanying cries of “Oh, God – no, not that shit again”, as the synth intro to Immaculate Fools rang out to my fellow students who were playing pool, a bizarre video bar football game or pinball among other activities. Like this:
I couldn’t easily tell you what it is I like about the song. The video above appears to have been made a couple of years later, but other than being slightly longer than the single, is pretty much true to what I was listening to. It was some time later when Mrs TGG heard it on one of my numerous mixtapes of the early 90s and said that the vocals reminded her of The Psychedelic Furs. Somehow I hadn’t clocked that, but I had to admit that she had a point.
So my love of this song appears to boil down to it sounding like another band that I like and the fact that at the age of 19, I just loved being annoying. The song was the band’s only UK singles chart entry, reaching #51 in its 4 week stay. It’s done well in recent times though, picking up just under 2.8 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. The only other person I know who admits to liking it is my mate Steve (the one that was at Rewind North last year) – I found this out back in 2006 when I was showing him how the iTunes Store worked!
Immaculate Fools – consider yourselves welcomed to the Unsung Hall Of Fame.
I expect my next scheduled piece will be some more Smash Hittery – I’m enjoying both re-reading the magazines and then writing about them as well. And that’s before I start the research on some of the more obscure tunes that are mentioned.
TGG
Wasting time in the study 
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