It must be cooties!

Does another Monday have your world shrouded in never ending darkness?  Well, let The Nest be the light at the end of your tunnel in the form of an oncoming lost hit train!  This is the day we chug down the tracks to haul another great song out of that caboose full of moldy oldies we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  DJ Scratchy’s got her turntables ready to go atop her graffiti covered boxcar, while the Sponkies play on the cowcatcher.  All aboard!  This week’s song is departing the station….

It’s rare for me to feature an artist more than once in my Dusty Vinyl Archive series… because these posts are as much about the people making the music as they are about that one song of theirs that I think unfairly slipped through the cracks.  But there are some exceptions.  INXS, one of the most underrated bands of the entire 80’s, has had three songs appear in the DVA.  Genesis, whose catalogue of songs is almost as large as Phil Collins’ bald spot, has also had a pair of DVA picks.  And of course, there was the 2 fer 1 DVA post featuring the legendary Kevin Paige…

A legend in The Nest’s own mind, apparently…

Well, we’re about to honor another deserving artist with a second DVA post… and who better than the band whose excellent work is almost completely unknown in America, the one and only Madness.  I featured their aptly named song “House of Fun” a few years ago, while noting that despite their erroneous one-hit-wonder label in America for “Our House,” they had a whole collection of great songs just waiting to be discovered.  One of those songs has become an occasional Mecca earworm, and hearing it again really gave me an appreciation for how wonderful it is!  It must be “It Must Be Love”….

Don’t let the disclaimer about extremely dangerous stunts scare you away.  The Nest has trained stuntcritters on hand to perform those…

Snuggle and Buster star in The Fast and the Furryness…

“It Must Be Love” is the group’s only song besides “Our House” that even cracked the Top 40 in the US, topping out only at #33 in 1983.  The song isn’t as wild and frantic as most Madness songs are, and that’s because the band didn’t write it themselves.  It’s actually a cover of a song originally done in 1971 by Labi Siffre.  The video, however, contains all of the usual nuttiness you’d expect from the mad lads… and even includes a cameo by Siffre near the end pulling off his sunglasses to reveal his smiling face…

I’m not sure if this was the extremely dangerous stunt alluded to or not…

In a world gone mad, you can always rely on The Nest to provide you with another great earworm every Monday!  See you next week…