Now largely forgotten, there was a small rush of UK bands signed to major labels around 1988; for lack of a better term, some members of the music press took to calling them the "blonde pop" bands, due to the uniformly bleached tresses of the female lead singers. The Primitives were the best of the lot, Transvision Vamp by far the worst, with Voice of the Beehive the ones who survived the longest. But the blondest of the blonde popsters was Andrea Lewis of the Darling Buds, whose locks were the color of the 80-pound linen resume paper from Kinkos. Like the others, the Darling Buds took a lot of their cues from a slightly earlier batch of UK indie bands, like the Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh, but they added an unapologetic pop gloss to the basic sound of speedy little two-minute pop songs powered by fuzztone guitars. On their early singles and first album, the excellent Pop Said..., the Welsh quartet filtered the sound of Singles Going Steady through an unapologetically '60s-derived sense of bubblegum fun. Producer Pat Collier (Soft Boys, Wonder Stuff, etc.) kept things from getting too slick this time out, but the Darling Buds' later, more "mature" albums flirted with Madchester dance rhythms and synths, as well as considerably slower tempos.

-Stewart Mason