I'm going to take a small side-step here and post a few songs which, while not truly my guilty pleasures per se, are IMHO the silliest songs by artists I'm otherwise extremely fond of. So to kick us off (and especially for you, Keef) here is a classic from ELO.
Now some may claim that there are other sillier ELO songs (and I do admit that 'The Whale' or the entire 'Time' album come pretty close), but I believe 'Don't Bring Me Down' is significant for 2 reasons:
1. It was apparently almost fully written and recorded one day in the studio by Jeff Lynne while waiting for the rest of the band to turn up. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise seeing as Lynne wrote a complete double-album 'Out Of The Blue' in about three weeks (are you listening, Axl Rose?)
2. This track heralded the end of ELO as an experiment between rock & classical orchestration. It was the first track they had recorded with no strings on it at all and in fact the strings section was summarily dismissed shortly afterwards (you can see them mucking around on a Moog in this video clip).
Coming from the disco-fied 'Discovery' album - or 'Disco? Very' as the ELO keyboard player Richard Tandy quipped, 'Don't Bring Me Down' was the highest placing single as a sole act (#3) ELO had in the UK, their only #1 being 'Xanadu' with Olivia Newton-John.
Bonus clip: What's that you say? You are dying to hear an a capella rendition of 'Don't Bring Me Down' with a somewhat cringeworthy choreographed routine? Well, here you go then...
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