Little Hits

Shampoo — Shiny Black Taxi Cab

(from the CD We Are Shampoo, Food Records 1994)

I heard this CD for likely the first time in at least 11 years this evening while I was making aloo gobi for dinner, and was shocked at how well it’s held up. Shampoo was a complete sham of a manufactured pop duo, a pair of teenage pseudo-chavs presenting themselves as self-styled “megababes” over a soundtrack of revved-up glam-rock bubblegum. The open secret behind Shampoo was that although the songs on their debut album We Are Shampoo were credited to the two singers, Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew, they were in fact written and produced by Lawrence Hayward, latterly of Felt and at the time creating a very similar blend of retro junk rock with the equally snarky Denim. Hayward’s knack for tunes blends well with the girls’ appealingly bratty delivery throughout the album, but for some reason, this celebration of throwing up in the back of cabs at 3 a.m. just strikes me as one of the great lost pop tunes of its time and place, an oddly endearing blend of the Archies and the silly bints I see alternately giggling and sobbing on the last outbound Green Line train on any given Friday night.

I’m shocked to see that Shampoo actually released two other CDs after this one, 1995’s Girl Power and 2000’s (!!!) Absolute Shampoo. And that they were apparently really huge in Asia. Who knew?

–Stewart Mason