Great Moments In Pop – The 80s Part 31.

Recently I came across some YouTube accounts that featured various clips from 80s European music shows, including Musikladen Eurotops (The Chart Show also gave us a taste of what songs were popular on the continent with The Euro Chart, which I am fairly sure lasted just one edition). As I am always keen to discover interesting things from this decade, I thought that I would take a look at some of the videos because, law of averages, there should be at least one song that would stand out and would be rather great.

Most of what I watched were Europop songs that even I thought were rather cheesy, but there was indeed one that I did like, and even though probably nobody can ever remember them from the time (well I certainly wasn’t aware of them until recently), I thought that I might as well do a piece and give them their moment in the spotlight all these years on.

My Favourite Toys were a synthpop duo from Berlin in Germany (or West Germany as I suppose it would’ve been back then), consisting of singer Mirjam, and Martin, who played the keyboards, and various other things that made some rather nice plinky-plonky noises, and he had a hairstyle that looked right out of A Flock Of Seagulls of some such group.

Their first single “Just One Kiss” was released in 1985, but it was their second single “Life Of A Toy” that caught my attention, as this is exactly the kind of thing that I like from this era. What surprised me is that the lyrics are in English, because I’m fairly sure that this wasn’t released in this country, which is a disappointment, because if it was, I’m sure this would’ve done rather well.

The video also featured some nice visual effects, but as I can find no other clips of them, this could the only TV appearance that they ever made. And shortly after releasing their second and final single, My Favourite Toys split. Once again, it seems that there was no album, and they can’t really have only ever recorded two songs, but apart from some remixes of this, there seems to be nothing else out there.

But it’s always great to find more songs from 1986 that are just how I like them, I definitely don’t think that the late-80s was a terrible time for pop music! I’m fairly sure that “Life Of A Toy” never made the chart in any country either, and I have no idea what the two members have been up to in the years since this, but I’m pleased to have discovered this.