Songoftheday 9/26/12 - Well there's a little boy waitin' at the counter of a corner shop...

Moving Pictures - "What About Me"
from the album Days Of Innocence (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #29 (two weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 13

Today's Song of the Day is one of my favorite songs of the 80's, and definitely my favorite "two-time" hit. Moving Pictures were a band from Sydney, Australia, that broke through in American slowly but surely with a song written by guitarist Gerry Frost along with Frances Swan that got inspiration from Frost working with autistic children and a memory of an ignored boy, and was produced by Charles Fisher, who would go on to produce Savage Garden. It was an epic yet personal song that climbed rung by rung up the top-40, spending a dozen weeks to get to #29...

"What About Me" was huge in their native country, spending six weeks at #1, as well as spending half a year (26 weeks) on the American pop chart. And that's just the first time. In 1989, two years after the band had already split, and there was a mini-fad of resurrecting minor pop hits (aka "Into The Night" and "When I'm With You"), the single was re-released and spent another 17 weeks on the chart, peaking just under the top-40 at #46, and making the adult-contemporary chart (soft-rock) for the first time at #43. I was tickled pink at the time, since the album was pretty much impossible to find on CD or cassette, and the beloved cassingle was constantly in my Walkman. You can get "What About Me" digitally on iTunes or on CD from Amazon import.

The only other notable thing from the band was that they scored a track on the Footloose soundtrack (one of the very few not released as a single), "Never", which I loved as well. Frost left the band early in 1984 and formed the group 1927, who had one hit, "That's When I Think Of You", which was another one of those chart anomalies that spent one week on the chart at #100.

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In 1983, Italian singer Anna Oxa released a translated cover of the song and reached her country's top-20...

 
In 2004, Shannon Noll, the first winner of Australian Idol, released his version of the song as a single, and it topped the Aussie chart as well as made the top-10 in Ireland and New Zealand...

Another TV singing competition winner, Shayne Ward of the UK X Factor, also covered the song on his debut album in 2006...

And I wish I'd have gotten my wish to have Laura Branigan sing this song. She would've killed.

Up tomorrow: a "Popular" rock hit.