Songoftheday 4/17/17 - I don't need to fall at your feet, just 'cause you cut me to the bone...
from the album Pretty Woman (Original Soundtrack) (1990) and Indian Summer (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #8 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 13
Today's song of the comes from the British synthpop duo Go West, who had a stellar debut album in 1986 that spun off four top-40 hits in their homeland, but none of them reached that level in the States. Their second release, Dancing On The Couch, may have sold a bit less, but got their feet in the door of American pop radio with their first top-40 hit "Don't Look Down - The Sequel" in the fall of 1987. They laid low for a couple of years, and then re-emerged like they did between their first two albums with a contribution to a soundtrack; this time is was the Richard Gere/Julia Roberts rom-com Pretty Woman. "King Of Wishful Thinking", written by Peter Cox and Richard Drummie along with Martin Page, the latter who wrote "Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop)" from the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun movie as well as Starship's massive "We Built This City", encapsulated the duo's infectious hooks with a more midtempo soundtrack synth machine we came to know and love throughout the last decade. It was released as the third single from Pretty Woman's companion after Natalie Cole's "Wild Women Do" and the #1 pop hit from Roxette, "It Must Have Been Love". And they balanced out what really is a song about denial and heartbreak and made it funny, disposing of their serious faces for once and with a bunch of non-sequiturs, including both a Julia Roberts and a Richard Gere lookalike, the latter in An Officer and a Gentleman style garb...
"King Of Wishful Thinking" became Go West's biggest American hit, reaching the top 10 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart in August of 1990. The song also went to #7 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list. Internationally, the single did the best Down Under, hitting #6 in Australia, while reaching the top-40 in Sweden (#20), Ireland (#23), New Zealand (#24), and their native Britain, coming in at #18.
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Here's the pair appearing on Top Of The Pops actually singing live (for that show, a rarity, though a bit of backing track is added in there)...
...and live on stage in 2004...
...and yet again at the very popular retro Rewind concert series in the UK in 2011...
In 2015, pop princess Carly Rae Jepsen covered "King Of Wishful Thinking" for Sirius satellite radio, and brought a touch of sadness into the bubbly tune...
A year later, Australian singer Anthony Callea included an acoustic treatment of the song in his #1 album Backbone...
Up tomorrow: Latin freestyle singer has some cardiac trouble.
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