The Mike Flowers Pops are my bag, baby!
How the hell did I miss this back when it happened, in 1996?! I remember reading about The Mike Flowers Pops, and they had a song in the first Austin Powers movie, but I didn't actually listen to them until yesterday. Performing songs by X in the style of Y is nothing new (and it wasn't in the 90s, either; in this case X is a variable, and Y is Burt Bacharach), but The Mike Flowers Pops did it better than most. The breakthrough hit was a cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall" in 1995, for which the following video was produced:
As Louis Balfour would say, "Nice." (It was a cover in the original sense of the word: a competing version released while the original was still on the charts.) Other songs getting the Flowers treatment are Prince's "1999," and the Doors' "Light My Fire" (kind of pointless, it was a lounge song in the first place), and there is even a whole Velvet Underground medley. But Mike Flowers went a step beyond rehashing the songs of others and composed some original tunes, which beautifully capture the whole hippy, trippy vibe of 60s pop. "A Groovy Place" was the title track and leadoff song of the CD, thanks to such classic lyrics as these:
Take time for living things, and they'll make time for you
The birds and the bees and the butterflies, hey, they've got feelings too!
Now that's pure gold! Here's the whole song:
What a fantastic song and arrangement! The initial Mike Flowers mania fizzled out in 1998, as he tells it, and apart from a reunion show at the Islington Academy he doesn't seem to be up to much now, musically. But he has a MySpace page, just in case.
