A cultural tour de force from Fra Lippo Lippi, taking in Norway, Italy and Camberwell in Surrey...all in less than four minutes!
Shouldn't Have To Be Like That shuffled into play, a song that I haven't heard in a long time by a band I know next to nothing about....until Messrs. Google, Wiki and Discogs intervened.
When Shouldn't Have To Be Like That was originally recorded in 1985, for the band's self-financed third album Songs, Fra Lippo Lippi was a four-piece, comprising Per Øystein Sørensen, Rune Kristoffersen, Morten Sjøberg and Øyvind Kvalnes.
By the time that the band had signed to Virgin Records and re-recorded and re-released Songs for the European market, Fra Lippo Lippi were a duo of Sørensen and Kristoffersen.
Shouldn't Have To Be Like That was their only single to dent the UK Top 100, albeit in the lower regions, spending four weeks in February 1986, bouncing from 97 to 81 to 90 to 86, then...bye bye.
In addition to the suitably wistful video, there's a great performance on legendary Netherlands music TV show TopPop, broadcast on New Year's Day, 1986. The audience is small but enthusiastic, and all clearly adhered to the strict wardrobe requirement of 'bright colours only'.
Fra Lippo Lippi took their name from the poem by Victorian writer Robert Browning (1812-1889), born in Camberwell, died in Venice. The poem itself was inspired by Italian Renaissance painter Fra' Filippo Lippi (c. 1406-1469).
I was surprised to find I have over a dozen Fra Lippo Lippi songs in my collection, all of which will have been acquired online and from other music blogs, mostly made of EPs, random album tracks and a few extended edits from The Spiral Tribe series of bootleg CDs in the 1990s.
Whilst hearing this song hasn't triggered an overwhleming urge to seek out the rest of their catalogue, it was a nice reminder that Norwegian pop wasn't all about a-ha in the mid-1980s.
