Headbang - 3-3-17 - Results Part II

Theme 4 was the North American Place Names ko Final between East and South. The gremlins were at it again and Roxy Music's Virginia Plain soundtrack failed to play and there was a disastrous geographical error by me, including NWA's Get Outta Compton - which, of course, is in LA, not NYC. Mea culpa.

Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby and Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Philadelphia were insufficiently strong tracks to balance these errors and South won fairly easily despite Lynyrd Skynryd's Sweet Home Alabama also failing its sound test. The other 3 South tracks were all fairly strong:

• Glen Campbell - Wichita Lineman
• Redbone - Witch Queen of New Orleans
• Marc Cohn - Walking in Memphis

Theme 5 was intended to be a quick salute to the New Knight of the Realm, Ray Davies, but both You Really Got Me and Sunny Afternoon failed to play, but even this didn't deter the Headbangers who filled in the vacant sound with some "enthusiastic" sing-alongs.

Similar technical problems affected the next theme - New(ish) Artistes, with  both Jamie T's Power over Men and Rag 'n' Bone Man's Human soundless. Fortunately, Malcolm's three suggestions from the Tiny Desk series all worked OK:

• St Paul and the Broken Bones - Half the City
• My Bubba - Dogs laying around playing
• Fantastic Negrito - Lost in a Crowd

The overall Place Names ko Final was next. First, the draw had to be made for the 4 UK teams who would face the winners of the North American section, South. Two of the UK's selected tracks failed to play - Ralph McTell's Streets of London and Elvis Costello's I don't want to go to Chelsea. Nonetheless, Queen's Brighton Rock and an all-star line-up, including Springsteen, Costello, Grohl and Van Zandt, in a tribute to Joe Strummer's London Calling, were more than enough to see off South's tracks, the first and last of which also failed the sound test:

• Johnny Cash & June Carter - Jackson
• Mott the Hoople - All the way from Memphis
• Ike & Tina Turner - Nutbush City Limits
• Randy Newman - Birmingham

That just left Aussie Rock. I'd lined up 9 tracks of various Australian acts over the years and fortunately, this time, all of them successfully played. The results of the popular vote were:

1	INXS	Never tear us apart	60
2	Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds	Into my arms	54
3	Divinyls	I touch myself	42
4	Midnight Oil	Beds are burning	38
5	Men at Work	Who can it be now?	33
6	Wolfmother	Woman	30
7	Tame Impala	Elephant	28
8	Cold Chisel	Khe Sanh	14
9	Saints	I'm Stranded	11

It was late in the evening and voting was by now - shall we say - erratic?

By now, Gary had cranked up his old laptop and was able to play a couple of the tracks where the sound had mysteriously disappeared on mine (well Jo's):

• Roxy Music - Virginia Plain
• Lynyrd Skynryd - Sweet Home Alabama

- and it was the former one that we used as the backdrop to our team photos - before and after shots of an early dram celebration of my birthday this coming Monday: