Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before Your Hear
#17: Paul Lekakis – Tattoo It (1990)
The ‘Boom Boom Let’s Go Back To My Room’ guy didn’t even have one entertaining album in him, MATT KELLY discovers.
New Zealanders! Next time you want to shut an Australian up, just remind them that Paul Lekakis’s 1987 debut single ‘Boom Boom Let’s Go Back To My Room’ spent five weeks at number one on the Aussie charts. A frothy ‘You Spin Me Round’ rip-off with a lyric that would make the Venga Boys blush, ‘Boom Boom Let’s Go Back To My Room’ is a gloriously silly slice of ’80s cheese that flirts with so-bad-it’s-good status.
But for whatever reason, it took young American nightclub dancer turned model turned singer Lekakis three years to get the album out, by which time the Hi-NRG sound was extremely dated. It was going to have to be really good to fight the tide of fashion and who I am kidding, this is terrible.
Incredibly crap 80s club music from a guy whose rise was predicated on his looks and not his singing ability with cheap cookie-cutter production (and *really* poor lyrics, even for this style), songs like ‘You Know You Want It’ will drain your will to live.
Just try to survive the first minute of ‘You Blow Me Away’, a track so poorly assembled it sounds like a parody with Lekakis’s weak warbling the poisoned cherry on top.
The tracks are liberally sprinkled with electronic sound FX that were trendy in 1985 but by the time of release were just irritating – see the depressingly upbeat goddamn ‘One Step Closer’ and those bizarre frog noises or whatever they are.
Every song sounds more desperately, artificially cheerful and sexed-up than the last. This makes Kylie Minogue’s debut sound like The Velvet Underground.
