Because The Night

For those of you who ever listen to Singapore FM stereo during the early 90’s, you might remember the show ‘The A-List’ on The Perfect Ten 98.7FM. At that time, format radio was just taking off in Singapore, model after the Fox station in Australia (from which I think the current Astro radio channels follow, too). At that time, format radio was not heard of in Malaysia yet, we were still stuck with [tag]Janet Ambrose[/tag] on the Blue Network / Radio 4.

In the post grunge era of the early 90’s, ‘The A-List’ (hosted by the laidback Suresh Menon) focused on an emerging sub-genre called ‘modern rock’, a term that still survives today, although it refers to something a little different now.

I didn’t catch that many episodes of that radio show, it came on at a weird time of 7.30pm on Sundays. But they played mainly what was perceived as modern rock at that time – [tag]Soundgarden[/tag], [tag]Manic Street Preachers[/tag], [tag]Blind Melon[/tag], [tag]Smashing Pumpkins[/tag], you know the ilk.

But one song from that show really stayed in memory was [tag]10,000 Maniacs[/tag]’ “Because the Night”. Simply loved [tag]Natalie Merchant[/tag]’s take on that the classic by [tag]Patti Smith[/tag]. From that song, I started to explore some of the Maniacs’ older music, but I still felt that was the pinnacle of their long career.

Merchant left the group soon after that, and released a solo album called ‘[tag]Tigerlily[/tag]‘. Didn’t really like it. She’s had quite a few since then, i heard.