My Top 2000 Songs #1038: Baby I Don't Care

Guilty Pleasure file? Honestly, I don't think so. Sure, take your basic "Wild Thing" riff and blow it up with endless walls of reverb (which, to be fair, X had already done with their remake of the actual "Wild Thing")... then have Wendy James totally sex it up. Should be cheesy as hell.

But when Transvision Vamp's Velveteen this came out in 1989, when I was knee-deep in law school, I needed something relatively mindless I could crank up when nobody was around, and this track hit the spot. It slotted in nicely alongside some of the other women-fronted indie pop bands I was into at the time--Primitives, Darling Buds, Voice of the Beehive--but with a more direct lineage to the 60s girl groups, slathered with a few extra layers of bombast. So I'll always have some affection for it.

Top Of The Pops:

Live 1991:

Wendy James in 2018: