All Over The Place - The Bangles

It's drizzling outside. Ah drizzle, that great British contribution to the world's climate lexicon. And what wonderful stuff it is. Deceptively wetting and depressingly frequent. Thankfully we also created the perfect antidote to the all encompassing metrological condition; pop. So perhaps, and I'm not about to write a thesis on this, but just maybe without drizzle we wouldn't have such a great pop history; Yardbirds, Kinks, Beatles, Small Faces, Jam, Madness, The Specials...the beat goes on.

'All Over The Place' is The Bangles first real album and their most pure. From a pop perspective that is. Twelve three minute pop songs crammed with hooks, melodies and riffs. 'James' is simply a great pop song, 'Going Down To Liverpool' equally so. And the top tunes keep coming. I don't think that The Bangles got the credit that they deserved for writing consistently fab pop songs.

Not that I'm trying to claim that The Bangles are British or anything, but their sound in massively influenced by the British pop invasion into the states of the 1960s. Jangling guitars, pop melodies, harmonies, short blasts of songs. Oh how very Beatlesque. And the perfect antidote to looking out the window at a grey blanket of miserableness. Drizzle. Oh that wicked destroyer of BBQ's but creator of pop.