Time once again for a Big Q Cassette Classic!
It was early 1986, I was about to be kicked out of NDSU, and my music taste was experiencing the widest spectrum it’s ever known. I was delivering pizza for a living and one of the company cars only had an AM radio. There was an oldie station on the AM dial so I was discovering all the classics from Motown to Buddy Holly. Fargo also had an AOR station, Album-Oriented Rock. That means they played deep cuts on albums. It was mainly a classic rock format so you’d hear everything, sometimes the whole album at one time. (I would later find out that if you heard a whole album, the DJ was either having a tough time in the bathroom, or he was getting laid.)
There were also plenty of Top 40 stations in town. One day I heard a song on one of those stations from a new band from Australia call Psuedo Echo. It was called “Living in a Dream” and I was hooked. I was sure I was listening to the next big thing. Turns out I was wrong.
You see, the sound of Psuedo Echo wasn’t distinctive. It had guitars and drums, but then it also had that horrible 80s synth sound, and on occasion, synth drums. “Living in a Dream” also had horns. In my jumbled up music taste at the time it was perfect for me, but looking back at it now it’s like…”Jesus’ fellas! Pick a lane!” I bought their album, Love an Adventure, and I found it to be very good. But it was the 80s, everyone was doing cocaine, allegedly, and the record company thought they needed a smash hit, so they had them redo “Funkytown”.
A few months after I bought my cassette, I saw “Funkytown” was now on the album. Thank God I got a version without that POS on it. So, between the bad advice from the coked up record execs, plus the emergence of 80s Hair Band Ballads, Pseudo Echo got lost in the mix, but “Living in a Dream” remains one of my Cassette Classics.