Another band from Sweden. Odd choice of name though.

This song had an old-fashioned feel even in 1998 when it was a big hit in the UK but it has such a good Latin-tinged upbeat swing to it you can’t help but be drawn in.

And, rather than fading out, it actually ends. What more could you ask?

A bit of all-out guitar rock from 1998.

The band’s third (equal) biggest UK hit at no 9.

Marie Fredriksson, half of Swedish pop/rock duo Roxette, died earlier this week after a long illness occasioned by a brain tumour from which she had seemed to recover but which unfortunately recurred.

Roxette’s œuvre was one of those which you recognise when you hear them but maybe can’t quite put your finger on fully. Or is that just my age? Their songs tended however to be accomplished and reasonably well-polished.

This one was a no 1 all over the rest of Europe but reached only no 4 in the UK.

Gun-Marie Fredriksson: 30/5/1958–9/12/2019. So it goes.

Another of those Beautiful South songs with a barbed lyric. See my comments on Song for Whoever.

For single release and radio play the line in this which reads, “Don’t marry her, have me,” was changed from something altogether more fruity, as was the euphemism “Sandra Bullocks”.

Part of the lyric always annoyed me, though. “Take the kiddies to the park,” doesn’t scan. “Take the kids to the park,” would.

The less work-friendly, more earthy, version of Don’t Marry Her can be found here.

It’s an unusual song, to say the least, that hymns the delights of a cross-country method of public transport. Yet that is exactly what this jaunty, tongue-in-cheek number from 1998 does.

It is also a statement of sorts to name your band after a famous poem by Dante Alighieri even though it is a bit of a pisstake.

The song contains one of pop lyrics’ immortal lines in, “It’s hard to get by when your arse is the size of a small country.”

There was just something about this that I liked.

Maybe it was because the sound reminded me of Badfinger, as I’ve mentioned before, specifically Day After Day.

It’s a day early for the fiftieth anniversary of the real moon landing and the lyric actually has nothing to do with it, but hey, it’s a good song.

A typical jangly track from The Farm in the vein of Groovy Train and All Together Now. The video below may have been inspired by the TV comedy Up Pompeii! which would explain the appearance in it of that programme’s leading light Frankie Howerd. His star was more or less on the wane (not for the first time) by the year this was released. I heard he was swithering about whether or not to appear in the video and his niece – or nephew* – said to him, “You should. It’ll make you really famous.” Sic transit gloria.

*Edited to add: it may more likely have been a grand-niece or grand-nephew.

The Lightning Seeds didn’t have as much chart success as the memory of their catchy, breezy sound might suggest.

This one for instance only reached no 43 in the UK when released in 1994. A year later it got to number 15, though.