Chris Rea : Stainsby Girls
11 responses to “Chris Rea : Stainsby Girls”
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Beautiful song!
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Is it just me, or has the link stopped working?
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My favorite Chris Rea song. And there are a whole lot of good ones.
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Still works for me, Paul.
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It works now. Before it was just a black rectangle that did nothing when clicked on.
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It’s too bad that the video is not as evocative as the song. The women look like standard-issue MTV girls of the period, not Stainsby girls. Not that I have any idea at all of what an actual Stainsby girl would have looked like, but she would have been more interesting-looking than these.
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In a sense, perhaps. I gather that Stainsby was the local girls’ school near where he went to school himself, and as a teenage boy the pupils at the girls’ school, although his own age, seemed impossibly glamorous. So my guess would be that, like most teenagers, actual Stainsby girls had a marked resemblance to unbaked dough.
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They didn’t look that way to him, apparently. Maybe <a href=”secondary modern schools, whatever they are, turn out a more glamorous sort.
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Teenage boys notoriously see these things differently. I suspect the song has more to do with personal mythology than with the objective characteristics of the school or its pupils. (“Secondary modern” means not providing a particularly academic or technical curriculum, as a grammar school or a technical school would, so basically a very ordinary type of school.)
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The song is definitely about nostalgia for adolescent infatuations, but that doesn’t mean the girls weren’t actually beautiful. I’ve certainly seen some since I was a teenager, though they were probably a bit past 15.
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Knowing that the song is about schoolgirls makes the video, in retrospect, extremely creepy.
Light On Dark Water 
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