The teen sisters from Liverpool whose cheeky anthem took a cheap shot at the oldies
“… AM/FM, all that jazz, we’d rather sing along with Yazz, what happened to the radio, they never play the songs we know…” “…No heavy metal, rock and roll, music from the past, I’d rather jack, than Fleetwood Mac…”
It always felt a bit harsh on Fleetwood Mac, whose latest album Tango In The Night had been one of the finest pop albums of the late 80s. Still, naked ageism was fair game in 1989 when a sisterly teenage duo infamously took to the charts for the first and only time…
Like their contemporaries Big Fun, the project seemed to be little more than a dare for Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who were taking flak for hogging the charts and airwaves so, via Linda and Aisling Reynolds, they retorted with a song stating that older rock stars had no business dominating the radio station playlists.
We Don’t Want Them Back…
Despite an excitable acid house-inspired intro, the melody was arguably not one of the Hit Factory’s stronger efforts, and any method behind the message got lost in the novelty value. The whole thing didn’t, and hasn’t, aged well.
For all that, you wouldn’t hear golden oldies, Rolling Stones or Fleetwood Mac on Radio 1 after 1993, so a kinder view would be that this otherwise featureless track did make someone think as they unfurled a BBC spreadsheet.
But it’s doubtful. Kids loved it, of course, and it got to No.8 in 1989 on the UK Singles Chart. The Reynolds Girls remained very much a momentary phenomenon, with no album and only one follow-up single, which flopped.
Read More: Whatever Happened To The Reynolds Girls?
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