The most obscure pop standard of the 80’s must be John Paul Young’s “Soldier of Fortune”. I say pop standard because it exhibits every element of “popness” that should have ostensibly brought about an adult contemporary hit for Mr. Young. It contains a very memorable and addictive obbligato with a par-four synthesizer on typical glock mode, it features saccharine but accomplished vocals from a too-young-to-be-cool man of obscure national origin (à la Chris De Burgh), it contains fashionably insensitive references to America and savages, throws in a didgeridoo, and has a fairly good music video.
You can tell it was produced to go somewhere, yet it only was a hit in JPY’s native Australia. His previous hit, “Love is in the air”, was top 10 in both the US, Australia and the UK.
When you listen to it, you think you’re in an alternate universe where you are convinced you have grown up listening to this on “easy listening” radio at the dentist’s office. It’s amazing how much music, released music with accompanied videos, is out there, and how most of it is left to dry out like papyrus reed.
Shockingly, last.fm records over 11,000 listens of “Love Is In The Air” within the past 6 months, but “Soldier of Fortune” has received 11 plays, 5 of which are mine.
While the music video was easy to find on Youtube, the song itself seems to be out of print, and it took days for me to find a copy.
(He looks a lot like contemporaneous Cliff Richard in this clip if you ask me)
The song itself: